The Office

As part of finishing the closet project we revealed the actual state of the spare bedroom, which was not good. The space was poorly used and had been under a heap of closet junk for so long that new piles had formed on the outskirts of the disaster zone, creating little tide pools of mini-disaster. Every available shelf was utilized, but not well or in any semblance of a cohesive or comprehensive order. Little piles of "give away" and "I need to deal with this" cropped up and we were faced with the fact that, despite the closet success, the spare bedroom was still hopelessly useless.

I can't actually impress upon you how much worse it was before we removed the closet droppings, but believe me, these two images are already a 100% improvement of what it was, but that is not to say that the room was in good shape at all. (Notice the table lamp hanging next to the window. That was our only light source in the room. Also notice the inappropriately sized wooden horizontal blinds.)



So we started the process of refining the mess. The nice thing about deciding that you want to reorganize a room is that all heavy furniture must first be cleared of any weight, which meant that all of the bookshelves and the photo shelf had to be cleared of every item prior to reorganizing the room. This process took several days because we applied the same logic here that we did on the closet: nothing goes back on a shelf that is not being kept for a specific purpose and that will be used again.

Clearing the shelves was the first task. We started with the left side of the room. (Again, notice the lamp. Tacky, we know.)


Once emptied, the shelves could be refilled. The photo shelf was fairly easy because it holds mostly images, negatives, prints, and equipment. All of those things are still being kept, so I was able to weed out the few old frames and unwanted shelf debris fairly quickly. SPF's bookshelf was another matter entirely. The heaps of books and memorabilia laid in the middle of the room for another day. (Notice the lamp is gone. That would be because we accidentally knocked it down while moving the corner bookshelf and it shattered. I didn't know paper could shatter, but it can, and it did.)


Once that pile had been addressed, we had new piles of give away books and I started with the right side of the room. We were also able to put the Papasan in a logical and functional place. We were also forced to determine a new way to light the room, so an actual floor lamp that can fill the room with 150watts of light was purchased from Home Depot Expo. It turns out to be a much better, and much more elegant, solution to the lighting issues of the room.

Once the left side of the room was stabilized, we moved everything on the right side of the room to get access to the coveted space by the window. I wanted to set the desk up in this area because it has nice light, it is at the back of the room, and where it was located it was in the way the moment you entered the room. Seeing as how I am going to be staying down here a great deal more but am still self-employed, I needed a space that I could work that felt a little more feng shui. This is much, much nicer. (Notice that the wooden blinds have been replaced with cream colored sheers and drapes that were retasked from the living room as well as a new, and very fancy, double curtain rod that holds both the sheers and the curtains.)



Then I was faced with putting everything in the middle of the room back onto the shelves. I was able to get rid of so many things that we didn't need anymore (for example, receipts from the wedding for flowers and what not) that we were able to take some of the overflow of SPF's bookshelf and put it on mine. Even better than that, we have available shelves for future use, as of yet undesignated.

In these images the room still looks a little cluttered, but that will soon pass as well. The thing about cleaning out what you don't need to this extent is that you end up wanting to clean every space, wanting to weed out all of those old furbies and sweatshirts and novels that you hated or textbooks that you never understood. Good by "Chemistry the Easy Way" (my ass) and hello open, fabulous space. So...a lot of the clutter that is currently in this room is really clutter from the hall closet that has now been emptied so that I can start the demo.