I grabbed an armful of beach towels and checked the clock, recognizing that I had less than an hour to attempt to switch bedrooms. My wife Emily and my sister-in-law Audrey had just left the apartment with Mabel and Matilda, and I expected them back home within the hour. Earlier in the day, I had shared my vision with Emily about what it might look like to switch bedrooms with our daughters, but she was skeptical.

In my head, my idea was ingenious. I would switch all the furniture from our large bedroom with the furniture in the smaller bedroom, gifting the girls more floor space to play. Space in NYC apartments is a precious commodity, and I knew deep down that if I could simply show Emily what I was thinking that she’d think the idea was great too. I just needed to wait until she and the girls were out of the house!

Mustering up all the strength I could manage, I lifted the corners of our bedroom furniture, placed the towels underneath, and began the process of shimmying the pieces of furniture into the adjoining bedroom. Since we live in a railroad style apartment where you have to walk through one room to get to the next, I thought the moving process would be quite easy.

As the time ticked down for Emily to return, I feverishly tried to stuff some things away and stage the rooms a bit, but that was quite difficult when literally every piece of furniture had been dumped. I heard the lock of the door open and my wife and daughters returned. I ran to the door to greet them and stood frozen.

“I’ve been working on something that I want to show you. Don’t get mad,” I said.

Note: that’s never a good way to start a conversation. And as you can imagine, the adoration and thanks that I thought would follow didn’t.

“You couldn’t wait for us to get back?” Emily asked, as she dropped her bags, let go of Mabel’s hand and pulled Matilda from the baby wrap. She was clearly exasperated.

“Well, I thought that if you saw some of the furniture out, you could get a better sense of what I was talking about,” I said.

“Let me see,” she said.

With two tiny girls in tow, Emily walked back into the bedrooms.

“You moved everything?” Emily said. “How in the world did you move that wardrobe?”

“Beach towels,” I responded.

“Seriously, you couldn’t wait for me?” she said, her eyes scanning the room and noticing the piles of things tossed around.

“Well, if you had been here I thought that you might not let me go through with it,” I said.

Clearly my response didn’t help.

We walked out of the bedrooms, and into the one room in our home that was still intact, the living room. I once again tried to explain my impulsivity and why I didn’t wait to fully talk through the scope of the project with her. I told her my intention with the bedroom flip was to give our girls more space to play and grow. I acknowledged that I definitely could have waited a bit to start the flip and that it probably would have gone more smoothly if we had envisioned the project together first. We agreed to move forward with the bedroom flip together.

My impulse to switch bedrooms was the start of a radical transformation process in our home, one that would have a lasting impact far beyond the aesthetics and organization of our apartment. I unconsciously triggered a project that would invite us to confront all of the material possessions in our home and examine all the ways in which we were living. We were about to rewrite our parenting journey one tidy project at a time.

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