Step Into My Office

It's 2:24 a.m. on Sunday. I drank too much mate earlier in order to power through the insane amount of work that needed to be accomplished this evening. Although it did the trick, it has the unfortunate side effect of keeping me from sleep. It's alright though. I've always done my best writing at this time of night and even though I am going to pay for it tomorrow, at the moment I am luxuriating in the quiet.

The New Year thus far has felt like getting sucked up into a tornado, spit out at random intervals, sucked back up again, rinse, and repeat. We took a quick trip to Indiana to visit family. The kids got sick. Our plumbing busted. The repairs turned into remodels. The remodels turned into furniture Jenga. Josh got hit with a lot of new furniture building projects (hooray!). The staging job ended and two carloads of furniture suddenly needed to find space in our home. Which brings us to this weekend.

Last night Josh finished up a fireplace mantle for a client while I repainted our bathroom after the tiling and bathtub refinishing was complete. Late night number one. Today, we carted the kids to the staging project, emptied the house, filled both cars, unloaded said cars, and filled our house with another house worth of furniture. Josh left to install the mantle. I tried to parent in a disaster zone. Josh returned and took over parenting while i was tasked with finding creative homes for A LOT of STUFF.

We're at an awkward place with the staging business because we aren't busy enough yet to warrant forking out money for a storage unit, but we have enough stuff to need a storage unit. So the answer we found to solve this pickle, was to rearrange two rooms in our home.

Before I started writing, it occurred to me that since Josh and I have been married, we have lived in 6 different houses, and have never once had a dedicated office space in our home. To be fair, we never really needed one. Well, now we need one. The business side of the business needs a place to spread out that's separate from the kid zone. We need a logical place for the printer, our files, paperwork, etc. So we decided that our guest room would become an office, and that Eden could graduate to a big kid bed. So the guest bed moved to her room, her crib moved out, and still.....what to do with all this STUFF?

Josh had made a table for the staging gig that turns out is a perfect size for a desk. Check. There are two cozy lounge chairs that needed homes, rugs, pictures, plants, books---you name it, I needed to find a home for it (Insert chugging a full mate).

Since I am a designer and technically this room is going to be performing a different function, I obviously took on the completely unnecessary task of deciding to repaint the whole thing. New room=new design. I can't help myself. I'm insane.

So while we were up to our chins in displaced furniture, I was slopping paint samples on the wall, attending to my Instagram feed, half-parenting, trying to shove intermittent bites of food in my face, pausing periodically to question my life choices, regaining focus, drinking more mate, contemplating the drying paint, wiping butts, wondering where that one receipt went, and how and why do we have so many credit cards, and dang the underside of our bed is dusty, and the contractor smudged my fresh paint job, and wondering which pendant light would look better than the one we just purchased 5 months ago, and gawking at the size of our laundry pile, and remembering that I am incredibly efficient when I narrow my focus to small amounts of space, and going and going and going........

And four hours later, the stuff that will go in the office is staged in the office. Our bedroom is the cleanest it has been in a month. The downstairs is a train wreck, but our upstairs is inhabitable.

And three hours later than that, I am sitting at my desk in our new office. Utter exhaustion is just a way of life for us now, so that is taking a backseat to the novelty of sitting at my desk and writing a blog post. It's nostalgic. It reminds me of cozying up in library nooks in college.

It's amazing how when you create space for something, that something gives you space back. Having this physical space and getting more organized gives my brain permission to chill out for a sec so that my creativity can elbow its way back int my head space, and get back to the ridiculous work of choosing new paint colors.