office and a living room

Lately, I've been thinking about our little office/living room dilemma. I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't have a proper office in the new house, but I've also come to realize that we do a lot of work in a lot of other places around our house (hello, downstairs, kitchen counter, dining room table) that probably every space should be comfortable enough for working on a laptop (since almost 100% of our time, if you only count the weekends, is spent on a laptop).

So I decided to go back to Olioboard and fiddle around with a living room (for me to relax in and casually work on the computer) and office (for Idle Husband to get down to business) concept for the main floor of the new house.

Sidenote: I just realized this concept is especially girly. Sorry, IH. I promise there'll be more masculine stuff in real life! A girl can dream, right?

My favourite find was the desk. I definitely want a new one that's just as simple as the one we have now. But the problem with simple desks is that most of them don't have any drawers for storage. As much as I liked having a thousand pens and pencils and erasers and rulers and scissors sticking out the tops of cups and in stupid boxes and tins all over our desk, its charm has really started to wear off. Like really. I woke up one day and realized I've got a hundred mismatched pens stuffed into every available space and the clutter and disorder hit me like a ton of bricks. After schooling, do you really need to have over 20 pens sitting around your house? Even in school it took me a year to use one pen and I made a point of using the same pen every day, in every class until the ink was gone. The idea of taking all of our pens and throwing them out the window has definitely crossed my mind. And then I might stomp on them or run them over with the lawn mower. Yeah. Actually, I think the smart thing to do would be to throw them all in a bag and donate them to IH's work or some school somewhere (though they probably only accept unopened packages of school supplies for those in need. SIGH. Maybe teachers should stop making lists of useless school supplies kids really don't need every.single.year so those kids don't have to go through life with 100 pens floating around that they're never going to use. Packing them, unpacking them, trying to store them never knowing what to do with that huge pen-monkey on their backs. But that's a rant for another day). So don't worry. I won't ceremoniously chuck them off high level bridge. I do hate being wasteful (which is probably why I've been cursed with enough pens to give to each person in Edmonton in the first place). I just think that it would be prudent, at this stage in my life, to have four pens and four pencils that look nice and I can spend the rest of my days using them up (because that's exactly how long it'll take to use them. I might even will them to my children, because I have doubts I could even use all the ink and lead out of four pens and four pencils before my end).

Still irritating about Olioboard is the orientation of items, so what I would really prefer to do is put the desk behind the sofa. I think that would maximize space. You'll just have to imagine that. And there isn't an office chair because that side chair has wheels and looks comfortable enough to work in, so I thought it could move back and forth between the two areas. It's also a lot nicer looking than what I'm sitting in right now, tacky black leather IKEA I'M AN OFFICE CHAIR!!!!!!! chair. Oh really. We hadn't noticed.

I adore that sofa, too, but I'm still sad -- almost 6 months later -- about my missed purple brocade Craigslist sofa and matching side chair deal. I don't know if I ever mentioned it other than to friends and family, but just bringing it up now makes me almost want to cry. Admittedly, it was entirely my fault for looking at furniture 6 months ago knowing fully well I wouldn't be able to buy anything, but STILL. It was purple and brocade and tufted and almost like that teal sofa, but PURPLE. And not garish purple. Nice purple. I'll just sadly add that to my list of second hand/vintage furniture finds I wanted but couldn't have (cuz as much as I liked it, there was only so much I could fit in my bedroom growing up). 

And I'm definitely dedicated to adding more touches of yellow whenever and wherever I can. It's such a happy accent colour. I have no idea why I shut yellow out of my life for so many years. Oh and completely ignore my selection of tchotchkes. I mostly chose them for colour and orientation not because I particularly liked them. Besides, I have quite enough of my own tchotchkes as it is.

Now for a new house update: We got a possession date! December 21! What a nice Christmas gift! We stopped by this weekend and unexpectedly got to walk through it. They've finished painting the walls and the ceiling. I'm pleasantly surprised by the ceiling texture, actually. Ideally, I wanted a smooth ceiling, but apparently, it's still 1985 in the building world so they only offered popcorn or knock-down (unless we really wanted smooth, in which case we'd have to offer up our first born). I had never seen knock-down on a ceiling (strangely enough, something pretty similar is on the walls at mom's house), and I'm definitely not disappointed. It's much better than popcorn, that's for sure. We also had never seen the basement finished, so it was really interesting to finally get the chance to see the layout in person instead of just visualizing it. Now I feel very pressured to start getting things packed and organized. That's the terrible part about moving. I look around at all our stuff and it doesn't feel like much, but I know things always tend to multiply as soon as you want to put them into a box (refer back to my abundance of tchotchkes).