New Office in Full Force

The office transformation is complete. The carpet guys showed up yesterday, and depsite earlier fears about the need to glue down the tack strip for the wall-to-wall install, they were in fact able to nail the tack strips to the cement floor and install the carpet and baseboards. With that step complete, it was just a matter of moving all my office crap into the new space, and that only took a couple of hours. I realize these pictures don't really give you any idea what the office actually looks like. Disclaimer: I took them with my webcam during a conference call with someone else about mass email, and the webcam is really not the optimal device for capturing snaps of your home office for the next issue of House Beautiful.

It turns out that my desk is rather too enormous for the new space, but it also turns out that it is easy to take off the little pod that the multifunction printer-fax-scanner rests upon and use that as a free standing accent table. Isolating the printer from the rest of the desk has other advantages, too. It can be noisy, and it shook the whole desk complex when printing. Now I send print jobs across the room, and then walk two steps to pick up my print job. It's just like in the Real Office.

There are a few malingering issues. I may need to get a super long telephone cord to run from the router that is across the room to my desk. Right now, I'm just taking the handset to the desk -- we'll see how it holds its charge and then evaluate whether it needs to be on its base more often during the day. And I'm feeling a little woozy from the paint and carpet off-gassing. My natural-foods friend in Baltimore would be horrified that I'm working amongst all these VOCs, but I find the mind altering properties are really quite enjoyable. Never mind that stuff about the liver damage. I'm sure my liver is fine.

Best of all: I can't hear the neighbor's dog barking at all. Lovely!