The Perfect Chair

While my internet connection is fried, I sit here typing up posts in Word. It’s not all bad. I’m still in my pajamas and I have a big mug of strong coffee. And the rain has finally stopped. Not before causing mudslides and road closures, and quite possibly the trouble with my internet connection (the phone isn’t working so well either), but any reprieve is appreciated.

What’s on my mind is creating a better work space. I love my little office. It’s 10x10 feet, but only about 10x6.5 is usable space. The unusable part of the room serves as the walk through to the bedroom. This is the only room of our rented farmhouse that I got around to painting. (The other rooms I’d like to change are wallpapered. Not impossible to deal with, but more effort than I’m willing to put in when we plan to buy a house in the not too distant future. Plus, for various reasons, painting this little room turned into a huge, time-consuming project. But I’m glad I did it.) I have one north-facing window that I sit next to in my desk chair. The walls are a bright orangey-yellow, so even with minimal natural light, it feels warm and sunny.

I have a gigantic bookshelf that the husband, Jon, built to fit a specific space in our last rental. It happens to fit perfectly in my new(ish) office. A fresh paint job in pale grey and a backdrop of printed canvas fabric make it & me happy. It holds all my art history and theory books, art monographs, computer how-tos and business books, feminist books that fuel my photo projects, and my ever growing library of craft books (referred to in my house as craft porn. Especially the beautifully designed, instructional craft books with lots of pretty pictures). The bookshelf is a few feet beyond my desk, parallel to it. When I look up from the computer, I see all my lovely books.

Before we moved in, going on memory alone, I pictured a comfy reading chair in my office. There simply isn’t room for it. But I still want it. When I need to refer to a book or I just want to give my brain a break and look at craft porn, I want to get away from the computer and get comfortable. I’m thinking that maybe the desk chair has got to go in favor of a big comfy reading chair that doubles as a desk chair. Sure, I could walk 20 feet to the living room to read, but then I get distracted by things that need to be done in the rest of the house, or by the piles of reading I have stacked up in there, or by my knitting projects stashed on the living room shelves...

The quest for the perfect chair is on.