Thursday, August 26, 2010

the office, and by office, i totally mean junk room

We have decided that it is time to re-do our office, also known now as, the junk room.

We thought we were done with the house changing/work for awhile, I mean, everything was fine, but I changed our minds now that a third human being will be living in this little house with us.

When I was in school and had homework and projects and needed tons of space to work, this room was perfect. I had a drafting table, a table to lay things out on, the printer close by, another table to put together boards and even a dresser full of supplies including everything from my Prisma markers to rolls of trash paper and 3M's mighty glue (Super 77). However, since I graduated, rather since my friend Betsy graduated, this room has lost its need for homework requirements and has become the room that our cats' litter box and food is in. It is also the room that gets the brunt force of "I don't know where to put it, put it in the office." It's a disaster.

View of the office in 2007 before I got a rug, but at its height of usefulness and lack of crap.

Taken around the same time but it shows the wall color more acurately.

The beautiful part about this re-do is there is going to be very little construction involved. Well, the construction that does need to be done is bigger than I'd like to tackle, so we're going to pay someone to do it for us. Therefore, I consider it very little.

The ceiling in this room has detached itself in one area from the ceiling joists. We were just going to try and screw it back up, tape and mud it but I'd rather fix it the right way and if something is causing it to seperate, I want to find it. So Phil, our new handy dandy fix-it guy, is going to replace it for us.

We're also adding white quarter round to the perimeter of the room, because at some point, someone felt the need to remove it and never replace it.
This room is not only getting a ceiling lift and some trim, but is going to change in function too. Since I'm obviously not putting together color boards until 2 in the morning at home now (I have an office for that...) we need to re-evaluate and purge. This room will become our guest room/work space. Having laptops makes it easy for Paul and I to move wherever we want to but we still need a place for our files and printer.
We also don't entertain a lot of overnight guests, mainly our parents. Well, Paul's parents. My mom is so highly allergic to our cats that the moment she lays down to sleep, she can't breathe. She's fine walking around, having dinner, sitting on the furniture, but the moment she's laying flat, the wheezing and coughing and inhaler start. I hate that they can't sleep in our house but I'd rather her not die. So, that leaves mainly Paul's mom and dad. The number one issue with this space becoming a guest room is that this is the only place we've been able to make our cat litter situation work. 
Our cats are strictly indoor cats and with every room in our house having a very set purpose with no small nook or closet of unknown territory, there just isn't a convienient, out of sight spot for their boxes. We have a back porch that could work, but only if we had it enclosed better. Currently it's a screen door with screened windows and would need a more permanent window system to keep out fleas and other cats that have found their way to our back door. This would also require us to put in a cat door, which just the thought of that makes my eyes roll.

So, we're going to bite the bullet and let the cats keep this as their room too, when guests come, we'll figure out a temporary solution of relocating them but we'll just keep the litter cleaner than ever for now since this has become more of a "living space".

There will be new paint on the walls, trim and ceilings and the window treatments are due for a major overhaul. The current roman shades were already installed when we moved in and were from IKEA and are dingy and needing to be replaced. Oh and there will be a change in wall decor, which will also knock a few things off my life list (thankfully, because I haven't knocked anything off that sucker in awhile).

I'll keep ya posted.

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