So I heard through Alison Kent that Lee Goldberg was asking for office pictures.
Seems Lee was rattling on about Jill Krementz’ THE WRITER’S DESK which has a boatload of photographs of the places writers write. He mentioned that Brenda Coulter had posted pics of her office. He decided wouldn’t it be cool if folks took pictures of their writing spaces/offices and posted them to their blogs.
Well.
He has a picture of his office, of course, and links to Jennifer Crusie‘s office, Megan Crane‘s office, more …
So, here goes. …
A picture facing northwest. Note the darling mirror-image IKEA desks. I sit in the chair with the smushed pillows. his nibs sits opposite me. How cozy.
When we set up the office space this past summer, we had to carefully figure out what we needed and how we’d arrange it. In addition to the living/dining/kitchen/powder on the first level, we have this room, a bath, a closet area, a laundry alcove and an atrium opening (topped by a skylight on the deck) on this level and the master bedroom and bath as well as the deck on the top level.
This room, then, also serves as the guestroom. People sleep on the floor of this room (or on the uncomfortable sofabed) a lot. Being as in actual practice, we usually let guests sleep in the master bedroom, we’re usually the ones on the floor here and we wanted to be relatively comfortable. We arranged the desks so that we can roll out a kingsized foam pad on the floor between the edge of the sofa bed and the edge of the desks. Just barely.
The arrangement does mean, however, that when his nibs wants to get to the bathroom or into the closet area with the tall file cabinet, he has to wait for me to scoot close to the desk edge in order to give him enough room to get by.
Pain in the patootie, it is.
Closeup of the pillows. The chair is one I bought at an office supply store for cheap back before the really cheap leather office chairs existed. This chair was cheap because it was a floor sample. I can no longer make the seat adjust, so pillows it is until I decide to break down and buy a new chair for $40 at some super duper office supply sale.
The PEACE pillow by Mary Engelbreit — purchased at the Goodwill for $0.99, is perfectly shaped to push into my aching back as I sit cross-legged on the chair tip-tapping.
The mousepad was something I got from Powell’s last year when I entered their Celebrate Ten Years of Powells.com writing contest. Still haven’t finished using up the $100 gift certificate I got as runner-up in the contest. Maybe I’ll buy Krementz’ book with the remaining dosh.
Assorted files, a rolling file drawer from IKEA. That wad of stuff on top of the red milk crate is mosquito netting I bought (at the Goodwill, natch) with intent to make some sort of rollup gizmo to cover some shelves in the office whose contents we wanted to keep away from small children’s attention when they came visiting.
Still haven’t figured out how to do it.
Notebooks.
UMAX Astra 2100U scanner. Not the latest, nor greatest, but works gud.
Combination scanner/printer/FAX behind on his nibs’ desk area. We broke down and bought one for $30 when we realized we were FAXing a lot of stuff during house negotiations. (Still for sale! Good school district! Wooded! Acre lot! Build your dream home or just live in the house what is!)
HP LaserJet 1200. Also not the latest, nor greatest, but works gud. I learned my lesson with the HP Pavilion from hell. HP printers gud. Pavilions, well. …
And there you have it. A picture of the other half of the room would show cupboards and shelves and a sofabed. Not very interesting, and not related to writing. Boatloads of books and clippings and files and folders and stuff are stashed not too far away, but far enough away, I can’t just wander down in my jammies if I need to find something. I try to keep only the essentials here.
A Resolution for the New Year: Get this space organized and get the stash space organized and figure out what belongs where. I feel half fish half fowl and unsettled these days.