It’s been a few weeks now, but my new room is nearly finished. For those of you who haven’t been following along, I decided a couple of weeks ago to renovate my home office. When we moved into the new house late last year, my office had thick green rugs, an ugly tan with specks of green wallpaper, and it smelled like smoke. I scrubbed the wallpaper, put deodorizer rocks to suck the smell out of the air, but nothing took away the smoke smell in the closet. Once I made a decision to redo the room, my wife and I pulled down the wallpaper, scrapped off the glue (that took hours and hours to do), then I spackled holes, put on one coat of primer, and two coats of the blue paint. My wife then put on the glaze. This past weekend I bought the rug, my wife put my desk together, and I moved all my equipment and books back in. The most difficult part was deciding where to put all the equipment (TV, stereo, computer, etc.). With working full-time and having a 3 year old, I didn’t have a lot of free time to work on the room. And last weekend, with being away, I just couldn’t get a solid block of time to work on the room.
Though before Labor Day, my wife and son had gone down the shore on a mini-vacation and I didn’t join them until that Friday night (right before Labor Day). I had three nights that I could paint away. Those were rough days: I’d leave for work at 6:50 a.m., get home around 6 p.m. and paint until 9:00 p.m. After I cleaned up, I’d sit down and have dinner at 9:30 p.m. Long, long days.
What I realized though is that gone are the days of working late at home. With the office being right across from my son’s room, I couldn’t make a lot of noise banging, scraping, and the like. It’s funny because back in the winter when we were working on our library my son would come to the top of the stairs and yell: “Daddy, stop making all that noise!” Heck, since he’s now sleeping through the night, it’s best to turn the power tools off and pick up at the same spot the next day.
In the eight months that we’ve been at the new house, we’ve remodeled the basement (man, that took a lot of work), the front living room (turning it into a library), our son’s room, and now our office. We still have the master bedroom, and the fourth bedroom, the back living room and the dreaded kitchen and dining room—so basically we’ve a lot of work yet to do. I had originally thought that I wouldn’t work on remodeling my office until after we did all the other work, but with how hard I’ve been working on writing, getting published, and on my regular job, I really wanted to have another blue room. A room of my own. My wife had put together a sign with cool marbles and the like on it that reads: “The Blue Room.” I used to have this hanging in my old office (which also had blue for the wall paint). But the room I put together now has a new desk, with editing space for me and all my work tools (books, pens, paper, envelopes, etc.). The picture that I’ve shown of the “final” office still has the old, beat up blinds (new blinds will be going up later) and I haven’t hung up any of my artwork and photos. Still, we’ve come a long way from having bare walls that were ripped up and needed spackling to where I’m at now.
What’s the next project? Not sure yet. Maybe that dreaded kitchen. But in the meantime, I’ll be happy to be able to record my podcast in my remodeled office (of course I can also do that in the basement on the PC there) or I can finish a story that I’ve been working on. I’ve written four drafts of a story that I had in my head a few weeks back, but now I’ll be able to sit down and give it one final read and fix a critical scene, adding some content to beef the story up emotionally.
What I’ve tried to focus on is to strengthen not on the look of the room, changing the colors to blues which I find calming and creative, but also to add functionality to the room. There’s a lot more desk space for me so that I can put out manuscripts that I’m working on without cramming them on a small side table.
I’ve written stories and articles in all sorts of situations so the “Room of One’s Own” is a bit of a trick you see—I can be on an airplane, on the train, in my office, on a laptop in another room—it doesn’t matter as I can write wherever I want. But the sanctuary of having a room to think in is extremely important. Peace!
Comments