officious: the final(ish) object

So my brand new office? Amazing. So beautiful. So comfortable. So convenient. I think we should take the tour, don’t you?

Here it is! We have a lovely bit of window, don’t we? We’re looking out on a bit of grassy knoll with some greenery (ivy) and, since we’re westerly, we catch as much of the pathetic Pacific Northwest sun as is possible.

Our desks are a cute little matching set… in pretty poor condition, so we made matching blotters to cover the scratched surfaces. It was actually super easy: foam core cut to the right size, covered in black faux leather contact paper. Done and done! Plus, we had leftover contact paper, so we’ve covered other things in our office like pencil cups and the like. Instant classiness!

Here’s Kate’s side. We covered our cork board with some super cute fabric that plays up the color palette of the rest of the room and brings in some great movement and texture to the wall. Plus, notice how much we’re trying to cover up the ugly metal brackets on the wall? Yeah, we were hoping you wouldn’t…

My side. How I love you already. I could compose an ode to how many hours I have already spent cross-legged in that chair, hunched over the computer tapping away. We ran out of fabric for my cork board, but don’t fear: we’re heading back to JoAnn’s this weekend. Please also ignore the lunch dished I didn’t take off the desk before taking this picture.

Seriously, I just like this place. I keep my most-used books on the desk (the rest on their shelves) but the space is big enough that I feel like I can really spread out.

In the window, we have some glass vases painted on the inside with the same paint as we did the walls with. We’re planning on a whole collection of different sizes and colors (the minty green by the window, some orange and yellow by the bookshelf). I also have all of my important images with me…

On the right, Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg — it’s a long story, but I’ll say that Lincoln and I have a special connection. On the far right (cut out by my poor photography) is a framed poem, Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” On the left, a drawing made by an old friend of an important line from Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. Plus, I like bears. And the globe (which is actually a pencil sharpener. From the kids section of Target. Oh well).

These are two more of the drawings. We’ve got a line from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot and a line from “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne. All of my framed poems and lines are from works that were significant to my growth as a scholar, so I like them to be near me, reminding me of who I am. Cut out on the right is another significant Oliver poem, “Wild Geese” (which I’ve shared with you folks before. On the left, I cut out a picture from my college graduation; it’s of me hugging my advisor after walking off stage after giving the valedictory speech. Pretty big day.

Here’s our comfy spot for visitors. Isn’t that chair amazing? We got it at a Goodwill for a song and just had to recover the seat (surprisingly easy when you have a staple gun). We’re still filling the shelves (we figure there’s no rush — we’re there for 5 years!), but we were quick to get a tea set, tea pot, and french press coffee maker. We’ve got priorities. And do you like the mobile? We made that, too:

Here’s the lesson of our mobile: paint chips are amazing (and the people of Home Depot should be forgiven for hating us because we took so many) and it’s hard to balance three frames on fishing line. We used this as our template, but we substituted old embroidery hoops for the dowels the linked tutorial shows.

So, what do you all think? We did good, didn’t we? It’s funny, but just having that space to go to, where I have no distractions other than my supportive community of fellow teachers and where I can hunker down as long as I need, makes me so much more productive and so much more pleased with my own work. I’m really excited (and nervous!) for the coming year and I feel very pleased with where I’ll be doing that work.

Any additions you think I should make?

officious: before to middle

As you probably know, I have been in the process of moving into my new office for about a week. To be honest, my office mate Kate and I have been really excited about the new space for a while and while we budgeted a few days to move in, we didn’t expect to need quite this much time or quite this much effort. But things are what they are and we had to take those things as they came. It ended up being a much bigger project than either of us had imagined…

To begin with, the former resident of this office left two days later than the latest date he was supposed to leave. Oops. And he left us a big ol’ mess, a load of furniture we didn’t want, and an office we doubt had been cleaned in ten years… which we later found proof of, when we found trash in there dated 2001. I also found: a smashed light bulb, a coffee spill that covered most of a wall, significant water damage to the paint, and baseboards that simply fell off the wall. Fun!

This is the look of the place when we first went in to clean, paint, and reorganize. Notice, please, the dirty floor, broken furniture, and overwhelmingly poor use of space.

This couch was an absurd waste of space, not to mention an eyesore. Thankfully, some gentlemen from the Economics Department upstairs decided they wanted it when we stuck it in the hall and so we were able to get rid of the thing. But notice the awful condition of the wall, with it’s dented, peeling, dingy paint and those horrible metal brackets that were literally painted into the wall such that we could not remove them.

I’m still not sure why this bookshelf was on its side. But it was. And that superfluous chalkboard? Yeah, it had pulled out of the wall, leaving some exciting holes that we had to putty up.

So obviously this was a bigger project than we’d hoped for. I think we both expected to spend an hour vacuuming and wiping down the walls and then we’d slap up some paint and call it a day. Not the case! Instead, we spent hours scrubbing the walls, sanding down peeling paint so that we could paint over it, dealing with water damage and exposed, crumbling drywall, filling holes, etc. And only then did we get to paint.

But hey, once we got the paint on the walls and the furniture moved around, it started looking a lot better:

Better already! By the next day, we were ready to really start organizing the place and making it our own. I’ll save that for later, but here’s the look I went with after we’d finished painting:

skirt — American Apparel blouse — Guess, thrifted shoes — Old Navy

After having spent the previous day walking through my place of business in painting clothes and what I found out later was a surprising amount of paint in my hair, I felt the need to look a little more professional.

So that was the adventure of moving! Stay tuned for the final images — we’ve crafted, designed, and color coordinated our tails off and the space is really coming together!

today, we paint!

Hi, lovelies. I know I’ve been mostly absent for the last few days, but it’s because moving into a new office is a surprising amount of work. But today we paint and tomorrow we finally move the furniture, books, desk accoutrements, so I expect to be back in action soon. Till then, here’s the color pallet we’ve generated for our office:

two things I’ve learned while preparing to move into my new office

(1) thrift shopping can turn up very interesting things…

I should have gotten the pair for my office, right?

(2) sometimes a squash can feed most of a village or, in a pinch, at least this hungry kid and her new office mate, with enough left over for about 10 more meals

We’re very safety conscious.

advice request: office decor

So, my dears, as the summer speeds to a close (seriously, it’s August?), I’ve started thinking ahead to the new school year, which starts in late September. There are many things I’m thinking and fretting about, plenty of stuff to plan and worry over: new classes, my first term teaching, applying to and (hopefully) presenting at a conference in the Fall, finishing a conference paper that I’m presenting at the MLA in January, and etc. Heady, right?

But you know what I’m fixating on? My office. At my uni, first year Ph.D. students don’t get our own offices because we work as TAs instead of teaching our own classes. So sometime this summer I will get the keys to my office, officially marking me as a second year student and a soon-to-be instructor of my very own class. And yep, that means that I’m thinking about how to decorate my office. Recently, I’ve been pinning some images, products, and crafts for my future office and here’s my request: will you all tell me what you think looks like something an adult would have in her office and what you think looks too childish or unprofessional? Because that right there is what I’ve been frightened of. You know, like a reasonable adult human.

This mobile, with it’s lovely color scheme, would be so easy to make and I think it would add a nice jolt of color and movement to the window. But: does it look too much like it belongs over a crib?

This office organizer is made out of old shipping boxes, of which I have hundreds, and could be so useful. If I used a more professional color scheme, would it work?

Same story with these old cereal boxes turned into file folders for the desktop. With the right paper, it could work, right?

I love vases and planters and succulents, so I’m planning on having a few of those, but wouldn’t it be fun to have them wrapped in cork? It would be like having a bulletin board on everything. I’m seriously thinking about this.

I also like the idea of making planters on the windowsill out of old cans. I have a lot of old tea cans lying around and am a big tea drinker, so this seems fun, too. Or…

… in old teacups! Or…

… in animals, dinosaurs, etc. Fun, right? Or too much? You tell me: what will work?