a (mini) new start: reorganizing the office

So, first, some confessions:

We didn't go on our first long Sunday ride. The weather got in the way, so I don't have to feel too guilty about this one, and in fact I went to Sunday spin class instead (where I wasn't as on top of my game as I'd been just a few days before).

I haven't been counting my points. My excuse? I've been building the spreadsheet infrastructure to track those points; I'm figuring out this blog thing; we've gone out of town or had other out-of-the-ordinary weekend plans; etc. None of these is a good excuse not to stay on top of my tracking, though.

something that might help? organizing
I've long had a thing: where if I sit to eat and I see mess around me, I have to clean up that mess or else I won't enjoy my meal; when I worked in an office, I kept my desk clean and orderly (sometimes reorganizing every couple of weeks to keep files and such updated).

A cluttered space is a cluttered mind is a weak foundation for making good decisions.

So with me trying to keep up with this blog and all, I thought it might be a good idea to tackle our home office, which has always been a hot mess. My initial attempts to arrange the furniture were amateurish; so the space was treated a bit second-class; so crap was piled high.

a little bit of the before

Hot. Mess. Disorderly, bare, boring. I've always felt cramped sitting at the computer desk. And while I won't claim that what I've done to the room has brought cohesion, what it was before just felt ... floaty.



And when a cat who loves nesting in boxes thinks the junk piled on your desk is cozy enough to nap in ... it's time.



some things that irked me
The two shelves next to each other. Different fake-wood grain and color! Different heights! Different widths! I feel like we were straddling the dormroom/first apartment look with this here.

The desk with the computer (& friends). Overall, it just bugged me. You can see I backed a shelf against it so it could face into the room. There's a little side-table next to it to hold a printer, external hardrive, miscellany. Over time it became a weird floating island that gathered garbage.

My desk, abandoned. Without a computer at my desk, I hardly sat there. Instead, I emptied my purse on occasion (that mess is a whole other blog entry). Every now and then I've cleaned it off, but within two days its back to being a junk station.

Lonely walls. We have lovely diplomas to display, but they're too small for the walls where they hang. Plus? Boring! I want color! Something to inspire me when I look at it!

phase one of innumerable phases
I'm nearly certain this will always be a work in progress. I'm not an educated interior organizer lady. Our needs for the space will continue to evolve. I will invariably get bored with my view and want to liven it.

But I'm pretty happy with phase one. It's clean, open, and there's art!



I knew going into this that I wanted to move the computer from the righthand desk to the left one; to move one of those two mismatched shelves behind that left desk; and that was it, actually. My aim was to create an open space to sit and write, with books, notebooks and pens handy for my inspired moments.



I took advantage of the opportunity (me? organizing an entire room? it'll happen again, but not for many months) to find homes for some of the errant scraps in those heaps, and I otherwise rearranged and straightened to create a bigger feel for the room.



I love it!