House Craziness

After having read the Duggar's book "The Duggars: 20 and Counting" I was inspired to try a few things in our home.  Some of my inspirations dealt with homeschool and others dealt with the layout of our home.  This post deals with the changes to our house.  The first change we made in our home was to create a clothes room in the laundry room.  We moved all of the kid's clothes downstairs and they hang in a built in organizer that was already in our laundry room.  Ben and I hope to be able to add our clothes to the mix downstairs when we have the funds to purchase something for the clothes to hang on.  This has helped us out quite a bit.  1) We no longer have the issue that laundry gets DONE but never PUT AWAY.
2) We don't have as much trouble with clean clothes getting left on the floor of the kids's rooms and then rewashed because no one knows if they're clean or dirty.
3) The girls don't change clothes 5 times a day!

The next inspiration I had was that I felt the prompting to move the kids downstairs and create one room for the kids to share and move the family room upstairs to the main level.  Eventually, when we have the money we will actually build walls and have a boys room and a girls room but for now the 3 older kids are all together.  They LOVE being in the basement and I love having the family room upstairs in our main living area.  There are many things I love about my new set up.
1) There is no reason for ANY kids to be downstairs unless they are cleaning or doing laundry.
2) With nothing much more than just beds in the kids's room the room stays very neat and clean
3) They are right by all their clothes in the laundry room so they just wake up, make their beds, and get dressed before coming upstairs.
4) We spend more time together in the family room doing things as a family.
5) With the family room on the main level it is very easy to keep tabs on what the kids are watching and what they are playing.
6) It has made my front room a room that is usually company ready.
7)I'm not so worried about questionable neighborhood kids getting them to do bad things because I'm always in the know about what's going on.
8) All the toys just SEEM to be more accessible upstairs and the kids have played more with their toys than EVER.

All in all I LOVE the new set-up of my house and I am SO glad that we swapped everything.  I am thankful for revelations and inspirations that can come from so many good sources.