This part of the story belongs to my wife. Andrea is going to post her thoughts and story from time to time on my blog as well, so that people can see what she directly has to say.
The week Nigel and I moved to our home we painted the entire house.
Two caveats here:
- I didn’t paint anything. Nigel and my dad did it all. I am not trying to take any of the credit for the painting (though I did pick the colours)
- There were two rooms we didn’t paint. The first was the den which we painted in the summer of 2020 when we realized that a home office wouldn’t be such a bad idea. The second was the second bedroom.
It probably wouldn’t come as a shock that this room was always planned to be a kid’s bedroom. When we walked through homes in the buying process we imagined our future family in them. These rooms we always imagined would one day hold children and when we bought the house and moved in at the beginning of 2020 we didn’t think that time would be that far away.
The room wasn’t touched. We had no need for the space at the time so it stayed the gross brown colour that the entire house was originally. As 2020 progressed and we were faced with lost jobs and career changes we realized that children weren’t going to happen when we had originally planned (even writing the word planned seems like a cruel irony now) and also we had other more pressing home things to take care of. We had the aforementioned home office that came in very handy for both Nigel and I as we worked from home at different time periods and our main bathroom that needed a whole new tub/shower as we let the previous owner take her full seated bathtub with her and were left with a hole in the bathroom for almost 6 months.
We used the room for a bit of storage, just because it was there. My old dresser I was no longer using, some lego, our donation bin, etc… but overall we didn’t really think about the room at all. Personally I think I tried to avoid connecting the room to a child most of the time as it was sad to think about so whenever I was in the room I mostly thought about how ugly the paint colour was and asked myself “why did they decide to divide up the room ¾ of the way up the wall with a panel of wood?”
When the infertility diagnosis came I definitely found myself avoiding that room more than before. Tucked in the dresser were things waiting for that future child. Not a ton of things, but a selection of old books belonging to Nigel and I from our childhood, some picture books that I had been collecting for over a decade and a few clothing items that I had picked up over the past few years when I saw something on sale I wanted to have. So for a while the door to that room stayed closed.
A few months ago I decided that the room needed to get painted. At this point I am not sure if this room will ever be a nursery so it may as well get updated from the ugly brown that I hated. We picked a neutral cream colour for the walls and Nigel (as always) painted the walls. This was not a fast project (we were in no rush) and over the next few months we figured out what we were going to do. I decided I wanted to do something fun with the closet and eventually decided to paint in dark green, move the dresser into the closet and replace the original shelf and rod with updated ones.
This isn’t us moving on. We aren’t changing the room into something else just yet, but it isn’t just an empty room anymore. It honestly didn’t really feel like part of our house before, just a separate room waiting for its purpose. While we both hope that it will eventually be a room for some children, until that day hopefully comes I think this is a room that we won’t be avoiding.
Growing Inside, Shrinking Outside 
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