Office Re-Do

After we finished the flooring and trim work in the office (about a month ago), we decided to move the futon into the office so that the old guest room could be used for sewing projects. This isn't as easy as it sounds: our office is super teeny tiny, perhaps 10'x10'. And we still wanted the office to be useful and not cramped. To accomplish this, I dreamed up this idea of doubling the oak bookcase that my daddy built for me in high school as a desk, too. We went to Ikea and bought a table-top and three adjustable table legs (oh my gosh, I love this store!). Dave cut the table top in such a way that the majority of it rests on a shelf. Because Dave loves playing computer games with Edward when he's visiting (almost as much as I love cooking for him), we made sure to make an "Edward spot" at the new desk. To figure out how much room we'd need for this spot, I sat at the uncut table top in my chair with my IBM laptop (Edward has the same one) and wriggled around until we were sure there was adequate room for some intense Battlefield 2 action.

While at Ikea we also purchased some nice oak shelves and pretty black shelf brackets (to match the black curtain rods, of course) where we can store all the desk paraphernalia that we used to keep in the drawers of the old desk.

The shelving holds my ghetto rotary-dial telephone that I got to keep when I helped our family friends, Sue and Carter Wreden, clean out her parents' house in San Francisco. I've been waiting to use this phone for the last few years; I have very fond memories of this type of phone from when I was a kid. Edward and I used to challenge ourselves by dialing an entire phone number while only keeping our finger in the "9" hole. We'd carefully line up the appropriate number hole at the stopper tab. (It's pretty obvious from this type of thing that we didn't grow up with cable television so we have to create ways to entertain ourselves...) Anyway, Dave and I just signed up for a land-line telephone; until now we've always just had our cell phones. It came free with our new, cheaper-than-Comcast internet service and we figured it is always better to have multiple modes of communication. When Bear was staying with us he slept in the office, and as most teenagers do, he tended to sleep in until the early afternoon. He grumpily reported to us that the rotary phone is a great alarm clock: the ring is so intense that it rattles the entire wall and futon. Haha!