Plan An Office Makeover, step by step

Two things first:

1. We updated yesterday’s door-painting post with further-away exterior shots for everyone who requested those (and also updated our header- woot).
2. Sherry knows she owes you a door hardware post (she’s editing pics and writing it up for tomorrow) but simply to keep you dizzy, now we will dive into some office stuff. Told you we were all over the place these days!

Hot on the heels of our recent nursery furniture shuffle, we chose it was high time that we got shifty with our nothing-has-changed-in-eight-months office sitch (functional or comfortable are not words we’d use to describe that space thus far). In fact, adding a file cabinet was the first step (other than that it is simply been our old stuffed plopped down in a new, larger space). We went from a 10′ x 10.5′ office/guest room/playroom in the old house to a 13′ x 10.5′ in this one, but with windows and doorways in new places it is not making everything come together naturally – or even remotely efficiently. So allow me to bust out some graph paper to illustrate the situation…

As you can see, we have two doorways (a small one to the kitchen, a larger one to the dining room) and two windows (one looking into the carport, the other out to the front yard). It in short leaves us with only two functional walls and a couple of corners, which is why we have so far been living with this layout:

I will wait while you marvel at my paper cutting / marker drawing skills. While you do, here is what the room looks like in real life. First, the view from the dining room:

It is funny to think that this desk that once spanned nearly an whole wall in our old office looks so dwarfed in this new room. But since it was the longest piece of office furniture we had, it made sense to plop it on the longest wall to begin with. Plus, it was pleasant to have a window to look out while we work (even if it only looked into the car port). We in fact tried a few other rushed arrangements on move-in day and liked this best (which is not saying much). So it stuck for the last eight months.

Now here is the view from the kitchen with the green sleeper sofa (technically loveseat) as centered on the window as possible without crowding Sherry’s chair.

And as for the one corner you cannot see (with the Effektiv file cabinet), here is the best shot I could get before Clara and Burger came storming back in to re-mess the space (that ottoman’s full of toys and for some reason Clara does not enjoy having them put away as much as we do).

But Clara was not the only one about the mess things up, because we had some furniture-rearranging plans up our sleeves.

Sherry and I have had this itch to see if thing would work better with the sofa and desk swapped (we initially tried it when we moved in but it was before we got our secondhand desk chairs or turned the formal living room into a dining room) so we rolled up the rug and slid the pieces into their new homes. Our logic behind the switch was: 1) it’d be pleasant to upgrade our window view from the carport (which will eventually be an enclosed garage- albeit one with plenty of windows to let in maximum light) to front yard greenery…

…and 2) since the sofa matches in the blue/green color scheme of the dining room, we thought perhaps it would tie the rooms together better than our desk (while looking more living room-y and less office-y through the big dining room doorway).

But sadly, we knew nearly immediately that this layout was not gonna work. I noticed quite swiftly that getting into my chair (I am the seat on the left) was quite difficult. Not only because it is a bit cramped (hello sofa arm!) but also because the chair does not easily slide slide at all over the rug. So scooting my chair out was more frustrating than cutting Burger’s nails (which is certainly up there on the frustration scale).

One option would be to shift the couch and rug, but then things would start to get weirdly off center. Plus, none of that would solve having an AC vent right at our feet with the new placement of the desk (you can see a sliver of it above), which made us want to wear wool socks in the summertime. My toes are cold simply thinking about it.

But it is not the end of world, since we are not married to this furniture 100%. In fact, we have been dreaming about upgrading our desk for a while now. Allow me to return to my graph paper to explain. Let us start by looking at our current not-working furniture arrangement one last time:

We have consistently thought it’d be cool to create a “built-in” desk using materials like base kitchen cabinets and a wall to wall countertop. It’d give us a lot more surface area, plus it would add a ton of drawer and cabinet storage underneath. Sure it might seem like a major undertaking to some, but since we both work from home 24/7 we’d truly enjoy to make this room, well, work hard. And when are not built-ins a good idea? So we knew this desk-under-the-front-window shuffle would simply be a test before we invested in (or built) something customized for the space, like this:

But of course we now know that would simply exacerbate the sofa-cramping situation, cause issues with the whole rug/chair conflict, and most of all freeze the heck out of us every time the vent kicked on (and possibly roast us in the winter when it was heat). We know we could shift the sofa and rug a little to remedy the first two issues, but we think the room will simply start to feel off balance with them shoved in a corner, like so…

… and it still does not solve the whole vent issue (which we would not want to close or partially block since it is one of the only ones in the room besides the one near the file cabinet).

So thanks to our little furniture shuffling experiment, we are 100% sold on adding our built-in desk to the original long wall (which would look fairly sweet through the large doorway in the dining room). That way we’d also get an even longer workspace (we already dream of having space to spread out and as much storage along the bottom as we can). The slight bummer news is that we are back to the carport view with the desk there. But you win some, you lose some. More storage/work space + no extreme temperature issues due to practically sitting on the vent beats the view we hardly take time to enjoy since we are nerdy bloggers with eyes that are glued to our laptops (or our baby) anyway.

As you can see it does not totally solve the sofa situation, though. Which got us thinking that the sofa may need to find a new home, since he honestly does not seem to fit perfectly, and perhaps a smaller armchair + ottoman is a better fit. Like so:

After all, the priorities for this office are simply (1) workspace for us and (2) play space for Clara. Noticeably missing from that list is (3) sleep space for guests, which was the whole motivation for fitting a sleeper sofa into our last office (which also had to function as guestroom – which certainly cramped our style when we were both working from home full time). But now that we have a dedicated guest room, we can relax a little on the must-sleep-guests aspect of the old office. Whew.

So next on our agenda is to start scoping out built-in solutions. We’d enjoy to find something to retrofit at, say, the Habitat ReStore or on craigslist so we can avoid the cost of true custom built-ins and give some old kitchen or office cabinets a second life. So that is all TBD for now. But hopefully not for long, since we have left the current office furniture where it was so we have chilly toes and a janked up rug to keep us motivated to get ‘er going (for fear that if we put things back the other way they’d stay there another eight months).

Why are the rooms we spend the most time in consistently the last ones we figure out?

What is your home office situation like? Do you work from home 24/7 or simply do a little internet trolling during evenings/weekends? Are there any desk or built-in solutions that you enjoy and would recommend? Or are you also dealing with something sub-par that you cannot wait to remedy? Any other freezing toe issues out there? Not lively.

Psst– We were having slow loading/site crashing issues from 10-11am for the third morning in a row. And it is kind of a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare that we keep thinking we have solved (and then it happens again). We are still working on it (fairly much constantly for the past 72 hours). So sorry for the trouble!