New Home Office Completed

Sheila now has a completed new home office!

I've been working on the room and building a desk over the past two or three weeks.  The long wall of the room had significant water damage so fixing that was my first task.  My plan has been to remove half of that wall, install a beam, and open it up to a desk area of all windows that juts out into our yard. Until now, I hadn't repaired any of the water damage so that was the top priority.  The need for a home office presented itself so the wall needed to be repaired at least temporarily.  

I spackled the damaged wall...  three coats...  then two coats of paint...  then trimmed out the windows which were never trimmed when installed (windows were installed by the previous homeowner many years ago)...  added some crown molding...  then started working on the desk.

If you've been following this blog, then you know that we had originally ordered a desk online.  A few days after placing the order, we were notified that the desk was back-ordered and wouldn't be shipped for another month.  We immediately changed plans.  

I designed a new desk and compiled a list of materials.  We realized that we could do the job for half the cost if I built the desk myself so we headed to Lowes and purchased all the lumber, stain and polyurethane.  Now we just needed my health and the weather to cooperate so I could get the job completed.

It turns out that somehow I managed to build the desk and finish it within two work weeks.  That isn't bad considering my health and the weather did not really cooperate as well as I had hoped.  This evening we moved Sheila from our kitchen table to her new office space.

There is still one wall of trains...  the wall behind her while she is seated at her new desk is a wall of astronomy gear...  but she has far more space in this room than she did in the kitchen.  Plus, we get our kitchen table back!  We were both really looking forward to that!

Sheila seems excited to be working in this new office starting tomorrow morning.  She even told me she won't want to go back to her real office so she must be excited about her new space. 

I plan to write another blog entry about building this desk but, for now, I'll just share a few photos from this evening after we assembled the desk and moved all of her stuff from the kitchen to the new office...

I built a little wooden basket to act as a drawer on this top shelf under the left side of the desk...

The desktop came out nicely.  I ended up applying four coats of flooring polyurethane which should provide a nice durable finish...

I did my usual thing of covering all screws with wood plugs.  It requires a bit of extra work but the finished product is nice!  I think I must have used about 100 screws and a hundred wood plugs.  That was time consuming and a back-breaker!

Sheila is making sure everything works and is ergonomically placed.  We had measured her and then decided upon dimensions and measurements by using some ergonomic standards.  

We did change the monitor in the middle and on the left after originally setting it up as it is shown in this photo, below.  We removed the monitor stand on the left and then lowered the middle monitor too.  Removing the monitor stand also gave Sheila a bit more real estate on her desktop.  

Another plus of this office is that the computer is now hard-wired to a secure router rather than using WiFi.  

In this photo, you can see that we removed the monitor stand.  This seems to work better for Sheila and it is a much cleaner look.

I'm sure there will be a few more small changes made after Sheila works for a bit tomorrow.  We also need to hang some photography on the walls.  

The good news is that Sheila now has her own office space and we now have our kitchen space back for kitchen purposes.  

The bad news is this 'spare room' was our convertible guest bedroom but there is no way any bed will fit in this room anymore.