Every season we spend time rearranging our home.  Halloween gets spooky, Christmas gets cheery, Spring time gets plants & a good cleaning, while summer gets-well… rearranged.

It seems every summer we move furniture around from room to room.  Sometimes we even put up a coat of paint on the walls.  We reorganize the rooms for a few reasons:

1. Our family is growing up and the needs change.  We don’t need a crib, then we don’t need bunk beds, then we need a room for doing homework…  Or as our children get bigger, the couches need to get moved around so that everyone has a good place to sit to play video games or have a family movie night.
2. We don’t like/are bored of the configuration of how the home is laid out.  Maybe the brown couch would look better in the family room instead of the theater room.  Perhaps the piano would be nicer by the fireplace instead of in the sunroom.  Or the display cabinets should get moved and show off movie memorabilia instead of Lego sets.
3. It’s a way of purging stuff we don’t use or have a fondness for anymore.  As we move furniture around we discover that a glass vase or a gumball machine aren’t what we want as a knickknack just taking up space.

We don’t usually sell anything that we don’t need/want.  Often times we give it away to friends or family if they want it.  Or we get a load together and drop it off at a local thrift store.  My biggest criteria for donating items is that they are still useful.  No one wants a broken table lamp or an old tube tv.  So we take those to a recycling depot.

Summer is often a time to relax.  We get a jump on the clean/purge/rearranging now so that when the kids are out of school, we can enjoy the time together.  One day my wife and I will be rearranging our home and discover that it’s just us in here.  Our stuff will have been moved out or donated and all that will remain is our memories of the changes that occurred over the years. 

I’m okay with that because it will mean that we achieved the goal we set out to do- raise a family.