About a year ago, we started a major renovation project on half of our upstairs.

As with most projects, it took much longer than it should have, and more problems were encountered than we ever expected.

It’s not finished yet, but the main effort involved turning two smaller rooms into one large room, and making it into a new bedroom for A.

The boys have shared a bedroom since they were small. Our old house only had three bedrooms: one for Steve and I, one for E, and one for the boys.

When we moved back to the farmhouse, even though there were two additional small bedrooms, they were both in need of remodeling that we weren’t ready to do yet, so the boys ended up together again.

When I was growing up, pretty much everyone who had a same-sex sibling shared a bedroom. Since it was only my brother and I, we were “lucky” enough to have our own rooms. Some families with multiple kids even had three or four kids to a room. These days, that doesn’t seem to be the norm.

Most of the time, when I tell people the boys share a room, I am met with looks of surprise. Most of my kids’ friends all seem to have their own space, no matter how many kids are in the family. Then again, maybe it’s because people know G and A and can’t imagine them sharing the same space without getting on each other’s nerves.

As they’ve become teenagers and each developed different hobbies and styles, this difference has become a lot more pronounced, and the tension between them started to escalate.

Little things like one of them wanting to sleep with a humidifier on turned into bigger things when the other one complained about not being able to wake up in the morning.

One liked to study with low background noise while the other one needed it perfectly quiet. God forbid either one of them use headphones or earbuds.

Since Steve died, I’ve become acutely aware that between the four of us, we are rarely on the same page emotionally. It seems that we end up in the what I call the Goldilocks situation more often than not: one of them is having a great day, one of them is having a bad day, and one of them is just so-so.

When the one having a bad day is sharing space with the one having a good day, things quickly turn into two bad days, not to mention the effect it has on whatever kind of day I was having. Separate spaces couldn’t come quickly enough.

Since A waited patiently for this project to come to completion, other than deciding what color the floor and walls would be, I gave him free reign to choose the rest of his décor. Also, the bedroom set that the boys had shared since they were little was well past its prime.

Everything needed to be replaced. I guess I didn’t realize the toll sleeping in his twin bed had taken, until we went mattress shopping, and he realized that if he had a full-sized mattress, his 6-foot, 4-inch frame could lay diagonally on the bed and actually fit on it! His feet had been hanging off the end of the bed for years.

While the mattress salesman did offer to investigate extra-long mattresses, that also meant extra-long beds, and sheets, and A was more than happy with the diagonal option.

G was keeping their original room, which we had originally outfitted with a masculine blue and outdoor themed rug. He was staying there both because he’s the second kid, and that décor was already what he would have chosen for himself anyway.

Realizing that his also 6-4 frame was in the same dire straight as his brother’s, I told him he could upgrade beds as well. He immediately found a website with the log beds that he remembered from the cabin we rented in Maine.

Unfortunately, they were way out of our budget, although I did suggest he could try to make his own this summer. He did not take me up on that, and instead found a website that sells furniture made of recycled barnwood. The style was very G, as well as the recycled nature of it. Other than the logistical nightmare of getting it shipped, it turned out to be the perfect fit for him.

And, not to be left out, E requested to make a few upgrades to her room. Mostly because a string of LED lights she’d hung a few years ago had left some damage to her wall that required repair and repaint, and I’d been putting it off for way too long.

With my hands full of the rest of the project, I was moving too slowly for her, and she took the painting matters into her own hands. She did an amazing job. She also took down some of her “babyish” wall decorations, although she did keep her “how to be a mermaid” wall hanging.

She’s replacing them with some vintage posters that she found while we were on vacation last year. It didn’t take much to turn a little girl bedroom into a teenage girl one.

These projects, while necessary, were also a little bit of house cleaning for us, a symbolic way of moving on from the past. When we first moved up here five years ago, we cleaned and refreshed all these spaces as a family of five.

In these five years, a lot about us has changed, in addition to becoming a family of four. The kids’ new spaces reflect their growth, and their ability to move forward, while still holding on to the little parts of the past that are meaningful.

Along with these changes come some new house rules as well, mostly that I will be less and less responsible for keeping their areas clean and organized, yet another way that we’re moving forward and preparing for the future.

Like the future, it’s still a work in process, but we’re figuring it out. One IKEA bookshelf and full sized mattress at a time.

Liz Pinkey’s column appears weekly in the Times News