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| Crowded Office (BEFORE) |
Anyone who’d witnessed the truckload of stuff we hauled to Goodwill this weekend surely wondered what we were up to here. The big cleanout initiated from my lifelong desire to start my own writing business and I needed a dedicated space for the job. However, our modest 1800-square-foot home doesn’t afford us many options for a home-based business. The office/den area is half of a long, narrow room in our house that also houses the living area, separated by a partial wall. Being technology geeks, we have three desktops and two laptops in our house, four of which were jam-packed like sardines into that small office. You could hardly move your chair without bumping into another one.
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| My Writing Office (AFTER) |
Everyone who’s visited our home in the last year always asked the same thing, “How many computers do you have?” That should have been a sign something needed done, but we always used the excuse ‘there’s nowhere else to put them’ to justify ignoring the problem. Of course, trying to write amidst all this activity (especially a rowdy game of CounterStrike) did little to foster my creativity. Although having an entire room was a luxury, to be a serious writer, I needed a place of my own to feel professional, be productive, and get inspired. On a whim, I ran the idea by my husband to reconfigure the space solely for my writing business. Somehow, within a matter of hours, we made a plan to:
(1) Clean/organize the closets to store clothes and eliminate the bulky dressers.
(2) Sell the unused workout equipment (since we bike outdoors or use our gym membership).
(3) Move the desktop computers to one of the boys’ bedrooms.
When Friday night rolled around, I was itching to get started. By Saturday evening, we had reclaimed every closet in our house and I finally had that office space all to myself. It is grand (to me anyway) and I love working in this space. There is definitely something magical about having a room (aka ‘office’) of one’s own.
