The New Office, Novel Style

Somehow with all the new furniture and decorating around the house, my office has been last.  Which doesn’t make a lot of sense since I spend at least 30 hours a week in it working and I would suspect a good 10 more for personal stuff.

Ever since IKEA has landed in Charlotte, we’ve made a few great purchases at regular intervals and for some reason Scott was itching to go this past week.  So Saturday we got up and he says let’s go get your office furniture today.  Um, ok?!

Here are a few before pictures.  They’re really good before pictures.  And by that I mean they’re really awful and anything I do to the room surely will make it look like an outstanding renovation.

You can see the kids’ art thing to the left was exploding with paper, crayons and yarn.  My work area was exploding with paper, electronic devices and wires.  And yes, even a Twilight poster back there.

Nothing about the room but the desk felt much like an office.  Three or four years ago it did seem like an office seeing that I was working on the playroom floor, living room couch, dining room table, kitchen counter.  ANYWHERE to get my work done with two very small kids.  Honest to goodness, I remember taking it to the bathroom one time.

Now with the kids a bit older, I can sit in one place most of the day and they can come to me when they need something.  And there’s a good reason their art stuff is in the same room.  It’s their “office” too and they tend to congregate with me in the same room.

I have no idea why I went into all that except to say it was once again time for an upgrade to my home office.

I had almost no clue what I wanted.  So I popped up the IKEA web site and got to work.  A few fights later, Scott and I had something to work with (don’t worry, we’re ok.  really). We took IL’s and kids with us and made it an entire afternoon trip.  The kids did the playground thing, we ate meatballs and browsed the showroom.  And I had a list about 20 items long by the end of it.  The basics of what we were getting was a sideboard cabinet to go under the window to hold my printers and then two large bookcases/cabinets for either side of the window.  We really wanted a cabinet for above the window to make it a full wall cabinet but none of the sizes would work.

By the time we get home and Scott had the first cabinet put together, we realize that we got the wrong large cabinets.  Now, at this point it’s 8:26 pm.  It’s the kids’ bedtime and we have church the next day, Scott is leaving for the youth missions trip the next day and he hadn’t packed a single thing and IKEA closed at 9pm.  And it’s a good 25 minute drive.  Also at this point?  I have removed everything from my office and all that junk is in the dining room.  I can’t work like that all week while he’s gone and I’m surely not putting it all back.  So we hop into the truck (as much as you can “hop into the truck” with two small kids) and *quickly* make it to IKEA with 10 minutes to spare.  I’ll let you do the math on that.

Our plan of attack was for me to return the cabinets while he raced to the self-serve aisle to get what we needed.  And if you know IKEA, you know it’s not really a quick in and out thing.  That place is HUGE.  But we are packed in the car at 9:10. The kids fall asleep on the way home.

Scott worked really fast and hard to get it all put together.  We realize though that the two smaller cabinets we bought to go on top of the big ones in order to make it a floor to ceiling cabinet would just be overwhelming.  So we decide to put them side by side and create another sideboard cabinet to store the kids’ art stuff and we’d get rid of that plastic drawer set.  He had to get up early to get those cabinets put together and I didn’t reorganize all that until late this evening.

I still have A LOT of cabinet room and I still have some organizational things to buy for it but it’s a really great start.  So without further adieu (Kudos if you actually read all this.  I certainly didn’t mean to type all that), here is my new office.

Now, the only downside is that it’s all BEHIND me when I’m at my desk and I don’t get to stare at it all day.

I have to be honest and say I’m pretty disappointed with the quality of the pieces.  There are nicks in the shelves and the doors/shelving don’t quite match up.  But there’s no way we could have afforded to get a custom set like this from anywhere else so I won’t complain too much.

I want to mention the glass/white doors are actually set up so you can put pictures or fabric in there and I plan to do that.  Scott said he saw one showroom place where they had blown up b&w photos of the kids which I think would be cool since this is one of the first things you see walking into the house.

OK, so I had no idea I could talk about my office for so long, but there ya go.  Oh wait.  If you want to spend even MORE time on this post, see if you can spot my Twilight book set on my bookcases.  You know it couldn’t be *my* office without some Twilight in it.  Now…where should I hang that Twilight poster??