apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Not literally; The baby's room is on the second level of the house, across from the master bedroom. But before the baby arrived, I'd been using that room as my study. But to move my study, I first had to clear out our third bedroom, which we'd been using for storage. But to clear out the third bedroom, I had to create a storage system for the garage.

So to prepare for fatherhood, I started in the garage. I began by erecting steel storage racks along the garage wall to hold all of our archived files and books. With the leftover space, I also built an inexpensive but highly functional workbench area, using a combination of parts from Ikea and the Global Industrial catalog. It took a few weekends -- and a big garage sale -- but eventually we brought order to the chaos.

That enabled me to relocate my study to the spare bedroom. It's a small space on the ground level of Project Precita, on the other side of the wall from the garage. It's also home to the brick foundation that holds up the front stairs to the house. I covered the opening of the foundation with an old grade-school map of the US, and moved the rest of my existing furniture downstairs. My desk is an old Brown University physics lab table. I store spare office supplies in a row of old metal lockers I bought at a surplus store in the Bay Area, and my office tools live inside a 1950s-era windshield wiper store display that I found at a flea market.

With the baby's room finally cleared out, Nicole took charge. We painted two walls of her room a lime-green color. A friend gave us a hand-me-down crib, which Nicole supplemented with a changing table/ dresser from True Modern, a rug from Angela Adams, and a glider from Room & Board. We found some inexpensive, modular bookshelves at Crate and Barrel, and to give the walls more color we framed a few silkscreen posters we got from Super7 in San Francisco's Japantown.