I live in a house with David and Potter. Its a small studio apartment whose main room is 11 x 16. And yes for those of you quick at math that's 176 square feet. Tack on a very small entrance, the kitchen and a bathroom with a standard tub and we might be pushing 250 square feet total. About every 6 weeks I spend countless hours on the Internet looking up "designing for small spaces" and take all of my furniture and re-arrange it. Thinking that "this time it will satisfy my needs". I have a "space" for my bedroom, living and dinning area. But what there is no room for is an office.
I am a messy person, organized in a way that no one else can understand. In a small house, messy and unorganized equals countless hours of tearing the whole place apart looking for one receipt or a set of heirloom recipes on cards I could have sworn I put in a safe place. It is very frustrating at first, then comical, and then maddening when after spending hours I still can't find what I have been looking for and I have to clean up the whole place. I would give my left arm for space to make an office.
I even went as far as putting out desk to on a window ledge 14 inches deep next to our bed in homes that sitting propped up by pillows would some how make typing easier. But as you can see by the fact that I have not blogged, nor written a long email since doing so, it didn't work either. Sitting on a bed with the desk top on a window ledge is not ergonomically correct and would have the people at workers comp. cringing.
Enter the last "space" in my studio I have not mentioned. The walk in closet. For the past year this has been designated as David's sleeping space. A place that is quiet and dark and a twin bed inside. Seriously I think its bigger than my kitchen. But out of respect for a guy who works nights and doesn't get much sleep, I have never dared to touch it. Until today.
Last night David and I go the giggles as I was trying to sleep and he was sitting up next to me with the cords from Google Mars, and I wake up in the middle of the night sudden, this could not be a good thing, suddenly having images of a computer falling on my head. He looks at me and said "Christina, no body keeps their computer on the window ledge, tomorrow make my room into an office."
This morning, I popped off the hinges to the door of the closet. Just the visual of having 10 more feet of width was helpful. I put up to TV trays (of course miss matching) made it so one could still sleep if needed and installed another light and fan so that the computer user would be comfortable by all the rest of the part sleeps.
"you should blog about this." David told me before he left for the day.
My friend Katherine told me once, Christina you are going to look back on your first year of marriage and laugh, "Hey David, you remember the years we lived in that tiny studio when we had way to much stuff, you re-arranged the furniture all the time and you didn't have a real kitchen but made gourmet meals any way." And I will smile. Yep, I will reply, we learned to laugh more, enjoy small things and never take for granted any space, not even a closet.
Pictures to follow when I am done. I just wanted to blog, now that the computer is comfortable again and I am sitting on a chair and the keyboard in on a proper table.
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