For the past week or so, I’ve been doing something unusual for me: I’ve been working in my office. I have a rather nice office space in my house. It’s the upstairs bedroom, which is kind of like a writer’s garret. It’s right under the sloping roof, so it has a high, sloping ceiling and a skylight. The window in the room is a sliding glass door that leads to a balcony. There’s plenty of natural light and I seldom have to turn on a lamp during daylight hours. When I first moved in to this house, this room was my bedroom and the office was in the downstairs bedroom. The idea was that I could come home from work and run in and out of my office to cook dinner, do laundry, etc., and get some writing done, and then at the end of the day I could go up to my bedroom and be away from it all.

Then I started working from home and that arrangement no longer made sense. The upstairs room gets pretty bright and stays light, thanks to that skylight, while the downstairs room has one small window in a corner. It’s not really a room you want to work in all day. So, I switched the rooms. I could go upstairs to work, then my living space would be all downstairs.

That worked for a few years, and then I started migrating around the house. My internet connection was at my desk, and I’d disconnect and sit elsewhere to write. Then I got wi-fi, and I started migrating for everything. I even got a little laptop desk to put in front of the sofa so I could use the computer more easily there. I wrote my last four or five books sitting mostly on my bed (yes, in the room that I found too unpleasant to work in when it was the office). Meanwhile, because the office was upstairs and out of the way, it became more of a storage space. If I needed to quickly clean the downstairs, I’d just toss things in the office and shut the door.

I started working to reclaim the office last year, and the area around my desk is getting close to the way I want it to be, so I gave working there a shot last week. This room can get warm in hot weather and the ceiling fan hasn’t been working, so I’d bought a small fan. Much to my surprise, when I turned on the ceiling fan last week, it worked. I also had to replace the pillow I use to adapt my desk chair to me. It seems to be designed for a much larger person, and the pillow I’d been using disintegrated. Now the place is more or less comfortable.

I still have work to do in the office to make it ideal, but I’m liking working in here. I feel more like I’m going to work in the morning when I go to a dedicated room than when I sit on my bed or the sofa, and I feel like I’m ending work at the end of the day. I do take the laptop to the living room because there are some things I like to read while I’m watching the news in the evening, and that’s where I do my Norwegian lessons, but that feels different from having worked there all day.

I may eventually need different office furniture, since what I have was bought for when I was telecommuting and had both a desktop computer and my work laptop. The desk may be more than I need now and takes up a lot of space, and I need a chair that fits me better. Redecorating isn’t a huge priority yet, though. I need to work in the office for more than a week to get a better sense of it, and I need to finish purging, organizing, and cleaning. I’m adding some plants and maybe some other decor to make it more “me,” but anything major will have to wait.

In the meantime, we’ll see if it makes me more productive to have an actual “work” space.