Office Dreams

Today’s guest blogger is Helen “The Smurf” Ginger. At least, that’s who I felt like yesterday. For those too young to remember the smurfs, they were little blue cartoon characters.

This weekend, my husband and I began painting the downstairs bedrooms. We started painting the inside of the house a year ago, working on winter days when we weren’t so likely to be outside. I’ve decided we’re going through our “color” phase. We’re slowly getting rid of every blah wall in the house.

The bathroom and laundry room are bright yellow. The living room and dining room are baked clay (red), while the kitchen and stairway is a pumpkin-soup color. The upstairs loft is a combination of the baked clay and the pumpkin soup.

The two downstairs bedrooms will be totally different. One room will be all yellow, sort of a lemon custard yellow – the ceiling and walls. The other bedroom will be a yellow ceiling with turquoise walls. The bathroom in-between will be yellow ceiling with a combo of yellow and turquoise walls. We started with the room with blue walls – hence my blue hair, hence my nickname.

The blue and yellow room is going to become my office. The main part of the house has sort of a Tuscan feel to it, but this makes me think of the Caribbean. It’ll take us a while to convert it to an office since the plans include more than just paint. My husband is going to build a big (8X4) bulletin board for one wall and in the closet there will be floor to ceiling shelves on one side for books and office supplies. Yea! I get to bring out all the books in storage.

Besides my desk and the bulletin board, I’m hoping to also include my treadmill and elliptical trainer. Those are good “thinking” tools. Problem is, the room is not terribly big and we’d like to fit in the pull-out sofa for when there are guests. May have to give up something. Sofa or treadmill? Hard choice.

But the main thing is having an actual office with a door … an office with a bulletin board I can use for plotting or notes … an office that’s mine. When it’s all done, which may be months from now, considering all the building my husband will have to do, I may have an office warming. If nothing else, I’ll put pictures on my website. Hmm. That’s an idea. I should have taken pictures of the before, the during and the finale. Maybe I’ll take one today, before I head in there to do some more cutting in at the corners.

Have you ever planned out your dream office?