I'm not going to lie, there are still a lot of unopened boxes in our house.  There are entire rooms that are either empty or just full of things waiting to be unpacked.  It's not easy to furnish and decorate a whole house! 

Lately we've decided to turn our focus on our office.  At some point we decided that if only our office was set up, we'd be able to unpack a majority of our boxes.  All of the books could come out, computer equipment, important papers... they could all find a spot. 

When we started off, we had a mostly empty room: 

More than anything else, it's been a storage room for more boxes.  The only piece of furniture was one empty bookshelf, that we're pretty sure doesn't belong in there long term.  

The first thing we focused on was desks.  We wanted this to be a shared office where Tom and I could both work from home, possibly on the same day.  This meant two desks, with enough space to be productive.  

I had in my mind what I was looking for, and debated building it myself.  Unfortunately we haven't quite built out our tool collection yet, and without buying a table saw and a few other things, building a desk would have to wait.  Eventually I did find something that I thought could work for us for a while, and gave us each plenty of space.  The only catch?  We'd have to assemble them ourselves.  (That's almost like building it from scratch!)

Once we had the desks built, we realized we needed a rug to protect the wood floors from the rolling chairs.  We'll just pretend we also realized at that time that we'd need a non skid pad under it and skip over the part where we had to move everything around twice before we finally got the rug where it needed to be.  Ahem. 

Next came a bookshelf that was more appropriately sized for the room.  Again, I knew exactly what I was looking for, but unsure where to find it.  This is where the magic of the universe comes into play, and a catalog addressed to the houses' previous owners showed up in our mailbox.  With the exact bookshelf I was dreaming about. On sale!  And it came fully assembled! Woo hoo!

After that, it was time for the fun to begin.  There's nothing like a fresh new office to encourage you to finally frame your diploma from ten years ago.  It's driving me nuts that all the diplomas are different sizes and don't line up nicely, but I'm trying not to focus on that as much as "hey look, wall of accomplishments!"

Now that we have a fully set up room, with things on the walls, I think we're in love.  And Tom definitely cannot wait for the rest of our house to look like this too... 

Of course there's always going to be more we want to do.  We need to get curtains still (okay we need curtains for every room in our house!) and we want to replace the overhead light in this room as well as the one in the room adjacent to this one.  But for now, it looks a lot better than the empty room of boxes we had before.  Progress! 

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