Updates

 The birthday party was a wild success. The food was terrific, and the company was great. Alas, there were  no photographs. We were all too busy enjoying ourselves.

It's so much fun when you gather your friends together, and even though they may never have met each other, they all get along and have a good time. That's what happened. Instead of cake, I made red velvet cupcakes. They were delicious. I got some nifty gifts (which I didn't ask for) and some positively HYSTERICAL birthday cards. It was great.

My friend Janet-Lee, who does the longarm quilting on my quilts came and brought some custom decorated cookies. ("Too stinkin' cute!" somebody said.) 

She also brought the Scribble Scrabble quilt, which was tricky for a bit because M's wife, N, was attending the party. (M was traveling for work.)

N was talking about the quilts my grandmother made for all us kids. This seemed like quite the lead-in, so I brought out the Scribble Scrabble quilt, told the story and presented it to N, who was appropriately gob-smacked. I have to put the binding on it, and then it will go live with M & N.

My boss also came, and I showed him the office and remarked that I would soon be returning the WFH computer equipment back to the office. "Well, you should hang on to it. We're going to be needing you and this way you can work from home." So I did a bit of rearranging. I moved the big monitor to the corner so it would be available but not in the way. It really opened up the room and I can still work in it easily with my own laptop. Normally I write the blog from the couch, but working on a desk, with a great view, and the TV close by, is pretty cool.

I know I am going to love being retired. 

Red

 

Here is the Red block. I knew I didn't want it to be too dark, so all the fabrics are red on white.

These are the nine blocks. I am happy where this is going. 

Back in the office, I figured out what was wrong. This bookcase was blocking access to the right side of the closet. If I moved it, I'd have access and the room wouldn't be so crowded. But if that went away, I needed to figure out where to put the stuff that lived in the bookcase, and I had to figure out where to move the bookcase TO. (By the way, I originally put the bookcase there so the Roomba wouldn't get tangled in all the wires and cables from the computer and other stuff on the desk.) 

Once I had that worked out...

Getting the bookcase out of there was definitely the right move. The room makes a lot more sense, and it's easy to move around.

I put the bookcase in my bedroom.

FINALLY I get to get rid of the stupid table that was in my bedroom before. It was left there by the previous owner. While it looks like it might be useful, one of the legs was broken, so it wasn't stable.

The Office

 

A year ago I rearranged the office, but fairly quickly found a problem with it - I had a hard time reaching the windows to close the blinds. No problem in the winder, but I knew it wouldn't work in the summer.

And when I worked from home on a sunny day the glare bothered me. And every time I walked into the room, all I saw was the mess at the desk.

So I rotated the desk 90 degrees. This gave me easier access to the chair in the corner, and the windows, and any mess on the desk isn't the first thing you see.

.

Of course to do this I had to rearrange the artwork on the walls, move the bureau and clear out a lot of junk mail. 

One negative is that I don't have easy access to the tools behind the side of the closet with the quilt, but hell, it's a tiny room and I've got a lot going on in there.

I worked in this room all day, so I didn't get any sewing done.

Taming the Paper Tiger

I was able to spend some time sorting through my paper mess on Sunday.

 

I organized my boxes and shredded what was no longer worth keeping, then filed away what I needed to keep.

      It may not look like much to you, but it is like the world was lifted off my shoulders.

        And I got a small ottoman for the chair. It’s great, and it’s the perfect size. My mom tested it out on Sunday. She and I spent most of the day together just doing nothing. She read  (sitting in my office) while I worked on sorting through the papers at my desk.       

The new pillows are due tomorrow. Can’t wait.

The Office, Continued

 

I've been continuing to clean in the office. I ordered one of those metal shelving racks to fit inside the right side of the closet. This way I can store all the stuff that needs to go in there. Like all the stuff that's currently in the bins and on the kitty condo.

This picture taking during the day shows you how nice the room looks.

I found a printer table that gets the big printer OFF the desk! What a find! It's easily accessible from my chair, and doesn't block the view outside.

Since I moved the electric fireplace I had empty space between the end of the desk and the window, so I got this bookshelf. I'm sure I'll fill it up with stuff, but mostly I can use it for a plant and a place to display some of the bowls that I have.

I decided to get rid of the kitty condo, and find a chair to put there. This way a visitor can have a place to sit, and I can have a nice quiet place to read or whatever.

TA-DA! Getting the chair here was rather an adventure. I'll put a floor lamp back there so I'll have light to read, and I'm going to need a decorative pillow, but that's an easy fix.

So the big stuff in the office is done. I'm elated about the way it looks, and works. I never spent any time in here because it was always so messy and clunky. So how does it look from where I sit now?

Yeah!

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.

Gone!

 

OK, so this doesn't look like much to you, but to ME it's awesome. All the Fiestaware is gone, along with all the canisters, and some other stuff destined to be donated. I also donated all my old oil paints and watercolor paints. They filled two huge bins that had been sitting in the middle of the room. The room was full of stuff, the floor was covered with stuff and I hated looking at it. I’ve also got the shredding done. 

I’ve started sewing the blocks for the yellow and blue rail fence quilt. I have an idea of a different way to arrange these blocks, so I’m not sewing them together just yet. 

The Pit of Despair

I am not great at managing paper. My friend Julie calls it "The Paper Tiger." 

In January of 2019 my office looked like this. I spent the better part of a weekend cleaning the desk and getting rid of the junk. It was a good thing I did it. 

A few weeks later I was sent home to "work from home until this blows over." 

I pulled out an old card table and put my own papers on it so the desk was freed up to work.

Never in a thousand years did I expect to work from home for fourteen months.

In January of this year I built a pantry in the office closet. I still had to rearrange the rest of the closet, so, naturally, the stuff inside ended up in the office itself.

And then I got the brilliant idea to renovate my guest bathroom. The only problem is access to the shower plumbing is through the wall in the closet. So the pantry had to come out.

Of course it all ended up in the office, along with all the fixtures and things that were going to go in the new bathroom.

So when the plumbing was done and the closet was cleaned out, I was more than eager to put the pantry back together to get my room back.

This was a massive improvement, but as you can see, I had a long way to go.

So yesterday, two days into a long weekend, I started in on the office. My goal was to reclaim the floor space taken up by the folding table and clear off my desk.

You know you collect more than you need when you get rid of the excess and find yourself with empty storage containers (LOL) The stuff on the cat tree is stuff that's going in the renovated bathroom. I'm keeping the cat tree because I think I might someday get another cat.

Last month the town had a shredding event, so I had sorted through all my papers and brought a big box for shredding. The stuff in the corner is stuff I am planning to sell at the neighborhood yard sale at the end of June. 

So now the Pit of Despair isn't. It's now my Office.

It has been a hell of a year for me so far, and I'm looking forward to doing not a whole hell of a lot during the second half of the year.

Except in the Studio. I can't wait to spend more time in there doing my favorite thing... taking big pieces of fabric, cutting them up into smaller pieces of fabric, and then sewing them up into big pieces of fabric again.

Heh.