Summer Part Eight- Jozi's new office

I apologize in advance for the fuzziness and blurriness of many of these pictures. I took some of them myself because I was impatient to blog about my new favorite room, and I do NOT have Andy's photographic touch! Anyway, the last official activity of the summer was the gutting of my old massage room and turning it into an office. This is what my massage room used to look like:

A screen for hiding hooks for clothes, shelf for jewelry and stuff during the massage, and a mirror for checking yourself out after acquiring "massage face":

Completely useless-looking decorative shelf that holds some boring stuff:

Far-too-utilitarian-looking shelves that hold EVERYTHING else:

The lamps and overhead dimmer make it easy to darken the room, even though you really can't tell in this picture:

However, since I’m not massaging anymore but instead spend most of my day sitting at my desk transcribing insurance files, we decided to turn my massage studio into a workable home office. This was going to be a fairly simple project- we figured we’d paint one wall a pleasing color, use our old desks to save some cash, and get a cabinet or two from IKEA for storage. But as is wont in many of our undertakings, our intentions were derailed. We had this great (easy) plan, which, of course, turned into a great (complicated) plan. Observe the moment our direction changed:

And our eventual IKEA discard pile:

We hit up IKEA about once a week for about a month. It was pretty sad. One weekend I went twice. That weekend actually made me feel better, though, because I went with Sara and Rachel, and Sara had been there twice in the same weekend as well. And since we both had the obligatory meatball dinner both times, well, I didn’t feel quite so alone. Sara, you're a good friend.

But, we discovered, one can have one Swedish meatball too many. And about the time I had my fill of meatballs we had our last purchase. And I had a new office, and a very early birthday present.

Neither these curtain panels nor the track lighting were as easy to install as they appeared to be in the store. Who knew how hard they could be? Awful... but totally worth it when we finally got them done.

Even Caleb feels the pain of the extra-long curtain panel installation.

Thank you mom and dad- here’s the cabinet you bought! (Not the dog.)

Andy, God bless him, did all the building and fastening himself. Thank you, my wonderful amazing patient loving husband.

He even came up with a mirror design to compliment my recycled shelf.

I've got matching cabinets on either side of my desk, and wall cabinets above.

We had a lucky break when we realized my original desk would fit underneath my new desktop, so we didn't have to restructure any of the ergonomics. I love my workspace. My favorite pictures are all around me and it is, if I do say so myself, rather inspirational! To me, anyway. It's so pleasant for me to be surrounded by things that are meaningful to me. (You can look close, but maybe not too close... the closer you look, the more about me you learn. Observe at your own risk.)

I love going to work now! I mean, it was a rough gig before, putting on my dress-up slippers and sitting at my desk in the spare bedroom. But now I feel so OFFICIAL when I put on my robe and go to work in a "real" office. :) Thank you, Andy, for giving up so many summer weekends to build me such a great space! I promise to transcribe like a fiend and make it all worth it.