Jennifer and I have been planning on renovating our home office ever since we moved into this house three years ago. When we first moved in, we had a cheesy setup involving an extra dining room table, two laptops, and a couple of bookcases. We eventually bought a couple of cheap desks through Craigslist, desks which had originally been part of a church youth group center or something and which they sold to us for $75 each or so. Those, along with the bookcases we’d both been holding on to since the 90s, contributed to a decorating scheme that we called “Late Twentieth Century College Student Eclectic”. To give you an idea of what this looked like, here is a picture of Jennifer’s side of the office prior to the remodeling:

…and here’s a picture of my side of the office:

To our credit, each workstation was… functional. Jennifer’s overflowed with knitting books and various papers, while mine was covered with books, manuscripts in various stages of revision, and toys. And, of course, our computers were prominent on each.

This year for Christmas we decided that our gift to each other would be a remodeling of our office, to make it functional and — dare we imagine it — attractive. So the weekend before Christmas we went to Ikea and purchase seven large boxes worth of office furniture. The cats found them fascinating:

The whole time we were working on this I had Jonathan Coulton’s song “Ikea” playing in my head.

Anyway, assembling furniture is fun! Isn’t it? Sure it is. And after much pounding, drilling, and swearing, our new workstations were finished. The old desks we put up on Freecycle, and we made sure they went to good homes.

So here is Jennifer’s new workstation:

See? It’s all purdy. The desk closes up completely so the casual observer can’t tell, just by looking, that we are both terminally disorganized.

And here’s my side of the office:

Complete with a cat that shoots green laser beams from its eyes!

The bookshelf is cool because the bottom is a file drawer that rolls out to reveal the manuscripts that I have been working on (the file drawer also makes a swell lurking place for the cats). On top of the desk you can see the knitted Dalek that Jennifer made for me for my birthday a couple of years ago. And on the wall next to my bookcase you can seem the zombie-themed calendar that Jennifer got me for my birthday this year. (Every year I get a few more zombie-related gifts for my birthday… Can’t imagine why.)

At any rate, you have now seen where I sit and write… or, at least, where I sit and procrastinate. Exciting, isn’t it?