I Rearranged the Office

 When I moved into this house eight years ago, I had made a detailed plan about where every single piece of furniture would go. I had measured the distances between walls and windows, and I even noted all the electrical outlets. But I made one big mistake in the office.

The tall bookcase on the left, partly covered up one of the vents. The office is already the coldest room in the house, and reducing the heating input by half wasn't a good thing. I've always wanted to rearrange the room so uncover the heating vent, but I couldn't figure out how to do it.
 

The room is ten feet square, and one wall is dominated by windows, 

 

and another is dominated by sliding doors of the closet. When your desk is 78" long by 30" wide, there aren't a lot of options.

Unless you think out of the box. I don't know why I thought to put the desk in the middle of the room, pulling it away from the wall, but this allowed me to move the tall bookcase away from the vent.

At first I was going to set up the desk as in the layout on the bottom. I was worried I wouldn't have enough room to maneuver around the desk to get to the closet.  I actually went into the office and tried to figure out how I would move the desk. The desk is actually a solid door, so it's really heavy. It sits on two standard sized two drawer file cabinets. The file cabinets would have to be empty to move them, and I'd still have to figure out how to move the desktop itself. Fortunately I've done it in the past.

But something jiggled in my brain and I thought, well, heck, all I have to do is pull the desk away from the wall and rotate the orientation and I would get the same effect. So I redrew the arrangement with that idea (top drawing.)

Since I had made a scale drawing of the new layout, I was able to place a piece of blue painter's tape on the rug to tell me where to move the first file cabinet. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see I got another table that was slightly taller than the file cabinet. I lifted one end of the tabletop and set it on that. Then (once the file cabinet was empty) I was able to slide it out, and then swing it around into it's final position.

The next day I removed everything from the desk, slid the second file cabinet over, and then swung the table top over, resting it on the brown table.

I had already removed the contents of the bookcase, and with the help of a friend, moved it into position. 

Then I replaced the shelves, and the books. How did I know where the books went? I took pictures before I started!

Once the bookcase was all set up, I started to turn my attention to the desk itself, but then I realized that the small electric fireplace would fit perfectly on the wall alongside the bookcase. Plus it would be able to keep me warmer in the new location if I ever had to use it. (Remember I said it was the coldest room in the house?)

I added the artwork, and placed my calendar nearby and made some other small changes.

I left the painted bureau exactly where it was, and filled in the empty wall space where the bookcase had been with artwork, some of which has been in storage for years.

Istill have stuff to sort and move and maybe get rid of, but at least now I can walk into that room and not feel like an albatross is hanging from my neck.

Now the room is "my home office," no longer is it the "pit of despair."

"Breathing room" Julie called it. 

Indeed.