Redesigning the Home Office

I’ve always loved redecorating, renovating, and reorganizing my stuff.  When I was growing up, I reorganized or redecorated my bedroom on what was probably a quarterly basis.  My parents, God love ’em, were endlessly patient and never once interfered with my grand design plans.  (Side note to parents: you guys rock.)  

As an adult, that impulse has never really gone away.  While I don’t constantly rearrange and redecorate the way I used to, I still find myself examining the apartment from time to time and thinking “Hmmmm.  That needs to change.”

The need has been particularly acute lately whenever I look at my sad, cluttered, awful-looking space in our study/spare room.  I bought the desk just after I moved back to DC a few years ago, and as a $19 Wal-Mart purchase, it has served me well.  But the finish is coming off -- and I really feel that, as a (somewhat) functional adult, I probably shouldn’t have a decaying desk.

Similarly, the bookshelf was another Wal-Mart purchase that I picked up just after Hubs and I moved in together.  I was, shall we say, financially constrained at the time – so I bought it because it was cheap and functional. However, it’s ugly as sin.  There’s no escaping that fact.  It looks like something an old, cheap, curmudgeonly dude would buy after yelling at the neighborhood children to get off his lawn.  The only redeeming qualities about this beast are that it’s still standing and that the shelves haven’t split under the weight of all my books. 

It was supposed to be an interim bookcase.  My plan was to use it until I could afford a better piece of furniture that doesn’t reek of aesthetic ruination.

Two years later, it’s still here.

And I’m kind of starting to resent the shit out of it.

I get annoyed every time I look at it.  I’ve started mentally spewing vitriol at it, so now whenever I walk into the study, my inner monologue sounds like “Time for brain candy!  I can’t wait to check TMZ for some celeb gossi – GOD F*CKING DAMMIT, THAT STUPID BOOKSHELF IS SO F*CKING UGLY!”

I have less hate in my heart for the desk, since it’s less heinous than the bookshelf.  But still.  I’m not really a fan of either one these days.

So, I’ve decided to embark on a project to reclaim my little workspace.

I figure that I want to be writing more and that, hopefully, I’ll be spending more time at my home desk once I begin seeing clients as a health and wellness coach.  One shouldn't go about setting up a business if one hates the space from which she'll do that, right?

Seriously, I figure I probably shouldn’t loathe the workspace with every fiber of my being.

My mother-in-law just happens to have a background in interior design, and she also just happens to be fabulous.  She introduced me to apartmenttherapy.com – for which I’ll be forever grateful – and through the epic amounts of time I’ve spent on that website, I found this example of reorganized bookshelves. 

OMG.  Lurve.

I have plans, my friends.  Plans for a matching (!!!) desk and bookshelf, both of which are made of real wood.  Plans for colorful organizing accessories.

Now, this will have to happen in phases – after all, money doesn’t grow on trees, and I’m trying to pay off my student loans as fast as possible – but just the act of developing a strategic plan is enough to make me feel a teeeeeny bit less hateful towards my home office space.  Someday, with enough TLC and improvement, I might even love it.


For now, though, I'll just try not to scowl so much at my bookshelf.