Mary's Pad

In the last year we had a lot of work done on the house, and you may have read about it all in my previous posts. Well, today I thought I’d give you an idea of the space where I spend most of my time outside of work and sleeping. This is the office space we’re creating in the basement inner room that used to be Mary’s woodworking workshop. We cleaned it out, had the walls waterproofed and stuccoed, and then ofcourse Wesley decided pink wouldn’t be too bad of a color. As I said in a previous post, our contractors had a sense of humor. We did give them carte blanche though, and the color has grown on us. We will repaint it at some point, but for now it works.

This is a view of the bookshelves:

We each get one end and share the middle. As you can see it’s still pretty cluttered but we’re getting there.

This is Mary’s desk.

The power outlets are on the ceiling beams, which explains the hanging wires over each desk. I plan to clean that up some over the next few weeks so it doesn’t look quite so precarious.

This is where I spend most of my waking hours when I’m home…

It’s a little cramped, and I’m looking to add an extra surface to the right where I can put my laptop and perhaps a few more things. Or maybe I need to heed my own advice on multitasking and mindfulness and not work on so many projects all at the same time!

This is the printer and scanner station, and on there is my new really juicy computer:

On the shelf below is where we keep our office supplies and other random stuff. Incidentally, Mary built this station way before we met, and it’s been used for numerous purposes all through the house. Pretty handy.

This, if you can picture it, sits right across from my desk. It’s a nice comfy futon that we got off of craigslist.

It makes for an extra place to crash when we need peace and quiet, like when we were getting work done on the rest of the house, or just for a change, and most of the time it’s a great place to just lay down and read a book, or watch a movie on my HD monitor.

So that’s a basic view of the office. It’s a work in progress, but it’s definitely come a long way. There are a few things we still need to do. We still have a fair amount of residue dust, so we plan on shop vac’ing the whole room, and especially the ceiling beams. We want to keep the beams and all the wiring, pipes, and ducts exposed, but we’re going to vaccuum them thoroughly and then paint the beams. This should take care of the dust problem.

Like I mentioned, we still need to clean up some of the wiring, there’s still lots of unnecessary crap that we’re slowly getting rid of to make the room more uncluttered, and generally get the shelves more organized. The fluorescent lighting can be very harsh on the eyes, so we’re planning on getting desk lamps.

All in all, it’s a pretty sweet space.