I love blogging. I love the way it reminds me of things I'd absolutely forgotten. And today's post begins in just such a way.
For those of you who may be new(ish) to our blog, let me catch you up with the information that Ryan and I have lived in this house for 3 1/2 years now. (WHAT?!) Though the house was move-in-ready in terms of functionality when we purchased it, we spent he first couple of months putting our own personal touches on nearly every part of the house.
This is the post I wrote back in 2016, when I took you on a tour of the bedroom that we transformed into a home office. I read the entire post as I write this one, and that's where I found what I'd forgotten!
* First, I had forgotten what it looked like when we first bought it. The carpet, the paint, the wallpaper border, that really old and boxy mounted television...whew!
* Secondly, I had forgotten that I said this: "Today's room is one of my very favorites, and yet as I took pictures, it feels like one of the least complete. I guess I shouldn't say 'least complete' as much as I should say it's the one with the most room for continued growth."
And indeed it has been.
* I also didn't remember that Ryan kidded me about the paint color I chose for the room. The other evening, as we recorded our podcast, he looked around the room and said, "You know, I really like the color of this room."
Alas, just a couple of months after that lovely blog-tour, we had to take apart the entire room and replace the flooring. You can read the whole sad story
here, but the bottom line was that our cat's one act of rebellion against moving into a new home that apparently she did not ask to have was marking her territory in the office. She had never done that in her entire life, and she's never done it since, but she did it then. We did everything we knew to try to remove that awful smell, but nothing worked. So we dismantled the entire room and put down a laminate wood flooring and moved back in. (The second round of after pictures are
here.)
And now I bring you round three.
Kind of.
We didn't do any major changes. No new paint. No new flooring or even curtains or any such thing. But I did spruce up the room, because it needed something fresh.
Over the course of the last year, with Ryan's mom's sickness and death, with helping Ryan's dad and step-mom fix up a house to sell, and with projects we've had going on elsewhere here at home, the office became the catch-all place. I'm sure you can understand. You've probably had a room like that in your house at some point in time.
Our office sits out of the way from the flow of traffic in the house and it was an easy place to throw the mail, papers, stuff to sort, extra things, you name it. After about a year of throwing things into the room, "later" finally arrived. I had ceased to be able to find a creative corner of my mind inside that room. It was time to deal with it, and I did. I spent about a week working on overhauling the room from top to bottom, and I think it's done enough to write about it!
(I say it that way, because I have also come to the conclusion that thriving homes are probably never really
done. There's always something to switch around, spruce up, breathe new life into, and in so doing, keep freshness alive. One of my friends recently told me that she and her husband try to do projects - big and small - regularly so their home never falls behind in repair and in life. I love that philosophy.)
*
It started with the bookshelf. This big, beautiful shelf, built especially for me by my dad, is where I store all my nonfiction books. Since high school, I've always alphabetized my books, but I realized that in this rather small space, alphabetized looked chaotic. The books were all shapes, sizes, and colors, and it just looked like a big splotch of mess covering an entire wall.
So although I always said I'd never do it, I took all the books down, arranged them by color, and reshelved them. It may take some time to learn where they all live now, but I love the quiet beauty of how the colors fade in and out of one another. It is lovely to me, and it inspires me to be organized and methodical in my work. Best of all? It didn't cost me a thing except some time.
By the way, those brown boxes that are up on top of the shelf used to be in a closet, but I needed the space in the closet for something else, so I brought them out and put them up there. I don't need to access them on a daily basis, so it's not a big deal that they're up high. And the tan memo board on the wall is actually Ryan's. I bought it for him as a Christmas gift early in our marriage, and I leave it all up to him to fill with the pictures and notes he chooses. So I didn't make any changes to that.
*
Next up was the desk. The "desk" in our office is actually a dining room table that used to belong to Allen and Nita. When they got a new set for their cabin, they put this one in storage for Ryan to have whenever he wanted it. We ended up bringing it to our old house a few months before we moved, and then we brought it here. What you see in the picture is actually the smallest it will go, and we didn't have enough space to fit it in our kitchen. We decided to see if it would fit in the office to save us money on buying a desk, and it worked!
But it's big. Very, very big. And it has always been positioned in such a way that it stuck out into the center of the room, claiming most of the floor space. Ryan's big office chair and my big exercise ball chair also took up quite a bit of space. Add the cluttered desktop we've had for a few months, and this whole middle area was just an absolute disaster.
So I cleared off the whole desk, cleaned it thoroughly, dumped all the things Ryan and I need to sort into boxes so we can do just that, moved out the big bulky chairs, and slid the table around sideways, so it doesn't claim the entire floor.
On my IKEA shopping trip, I found these two sturdy little stools for about $15.00 each, and purchased them to replace the bulky chairs. They slide completely under the table when not in use, giving us even more floor space.
I brought the folder filing system up off the floor and put it on the desk, cleaned off and reorganized the lazy Susan that holds our pens and staplers and such, and brought the diffuser in to fill the room with inspiring scents.
Now I have plenty of room to lay out my projects, hold my laptop, keep my day planner, AND multiple cups of coffee and water.
*
I slightly spruced up the second shelf. I actually have two bookshelves that mirror each other, but the other shelf holds my fiction books. Since they tend to look more orderly in their series formations, I didn't make any changes to that, but I did try to clean up some of the paper piles on lower shelves. I brought out some storage baskets I bought months ago at the Dollar Tree and filled them with more office supplies (tape, envelopes, rubber bands, scrap paper, etc.) and now all those things are right where I can reach them.
*
Then I shopped the house. This last corner of the office saw the biggest improvement. What had been a floor space littered with items thrown in to be sorted later became actual
clean floor space. I threw out things we didn't need, found homes for things that should have been put away a long time ago, and added to our "sort now" boxes with the rest. I started making lists on my whiteboard, updated my magnetic calendar, and then I turned my attention to the podcasting space.
The table that did live in this corner to hold our podcasting supplies had been mine for about 20 years. I bought it from a friend right after I graduated from college, and it has served all sorts of purposes over the years. But it did take up quite a bit of space in the office, especially when you consider the huge dining room table sitting opposite it. So I took it apart entirely, and we'll be putting that in a garage sale next summer. Meanwhile, I shopped the house and brought in this cute little table that more than adequately holds all the podcasting supplies without sticking way out into the room. The stools that sit under the desk can slide right across the room when needed for podcasting and then go back under the desk when we're done. And with that, we eliminated two extra chairs from this room.
I bought two metal boards for about $6.00 each on my IKEA trip, and Ryan's going to hang them on either side of our caricature. They'll serve as my organization areas for our church ministries.
*
I cleaned the closet, too. I won't bother showing you that since it includes the cat's food and litter, which really isn't that exciting to see, but I did get rid of a bunch of junk that had been thrown in there, and I organized what was left so I can find what I need when I need it!
And now I can be creative again...and I already have been! Clean and inspiring office-spaces for the win!
