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New Office
I was just thinking about how much I love my new office!
We live in a 100-year-old bungalow in a historic district. While it's very cool to live in an old house, it has its challenges, one of the biggest ones being a lack of space.
The room in this photo has served many purposes for our family over the years. When my husband and I first bought the house, we had a toddler, and my grandmother also lived with us. This is the largest and brightest room in the house, and I would have loved for it to be nursery, but my grandmother claimed it so it was her room until she moved out when we were about to have another baby. So then it became the girls' room, and it was painted lavender with Barney purple trim. We did a huge garden mural on one wall when they were a little bit older, and we started measuring their heights on the back of the door.
Another baby came along and we had carved out space for him, but once everyone started growing into their teens, we avoided a move to a bigger house by moving everyone to different parts of the house. My husband built a bookshelf wall to divide another room into two rooms, so the girls each got their own, closet-sided spaces for the first time. That's when this room became the 'master' (Ha! You see those two little closets? Those are the only closets and they were used as household storage. hahahaha 'master'.... :) I painted it again, this time a very polarizing golden yellow. Whatever. I liked it.
By this time we'd lived in this house for about 15 years and I'd gotten really good at painting. I love to tell people that I've painting every wall and ceiling in this house at least twice at this point. Most of them more like three times.
One by one, the kids moved out. Our son was barely settled in his dorm when my husband was already ripping out an old corner closet addition to make more space in his old room, getting it ready for me to paint again so that we could move in there. The room in the photo became our most important next project: a room that any of the kids could use when they come home. So, behind those curtains is a murphy bed! We installed it ourselves (like we do most improvements around here). The room mostly sat empty while I used the dining table as my work space, working on my first novel there for almost a year.
But after I typed 'The End' on that manuscript earlier this year, I thought 'yeah, I think I deserve a real office space'. Yet another paint job later, here's the result.
I don't know if this room will ever achieve its final form. Just like life, just like family, it's always a work in progress.