There’s a fun site I’m going to send you to in a minute, but first I wanted to show you why it took so long to get my office redesign started.  You see, seven years ago, we completely remodelled the second floor of our home.  Our previous home.  The one we sold exactly one year after we completed my second floor dream remodel for that home.  The second floor where my office was. The office that had all new black furniture that absolutely floated in the huge office I used to have on the second floor of my little bungalow.  The office with a completely wonderful two-desk L-configuration joined by a corner piece.

Don’t get all excited.  The picture below was my last home, with tons of light, new bamboo floors, dormered spaces, and the other half of the room you can’t see.  This office was palatial.

So, here I was in my new dream home with this very large, very black set of furniture in an office one-third the size.  Not complaining by a long shot, just stating facts.

In redesign, furniture placement is everything.  It really doesn’t matter if the colors are great, the accessories are new, and the lighting is cool.  If the furniture doesn’t work, the room doesn’t work.  And the furniture purchased specifically for my last office did not work in here.  Trust me, every few months I was rearranging. I reworked paper diagrams and CAD designs.  Something had to give.

What I really needed was a wall-to-wall work surface in the space you can barely make out here because of the awful panelling.  (I showed you how to paint paneling in a recent post.) But neither desk was big enough, and no combination of desk + file cabinet worked, either.  Plus, I had this weird desktop organizer that you see on the right here that wasn’t working well, either.

So I sold the smaller of the two desks on CraigsList, sold the tall hutch (that normally sat on top of the lateral file) as well, and started hacking the desk corner-connector piece.  Just one strategic cut was all it took.

Nothing goes to waste.  The trim became the cleat. I’m not a fan of wood panelling, but this is the really solid, thick kind, and anything screwed into the walls is not going anywhere.

Connecting the modified corner piece to the longer desk, I now have one continuous desktop, made just for my office.

How much does this kind of thing scare you?  Excite you?  I’ll warn you now, if you love this, do not go to the IKEA Hackers site.  I could spend hours on here, looking at the cool way that people modify ready-to-assemble furniture for their needs. Seriously, people, you have been warned.

Stay tuned for future posts.  I’ll show you how my bookcase became a totally functional and beautiful part of my home office. Bookcases are both fabulous and intimiditating…unless you know how. I’ll show you.

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