I’ll open this post with a couple of questions —
if you live in a multi-floor house, is your office area downstairs or upstairs?
and where do you spend the majority of your day (upstairs/downstairs)?
I love having a laptop, and I use it all day long – but I don’t use it for uploading/editing photos or paying bills or keeping up with our business stuff. All of that is upstairs in our office on my desktop. It’s easier to do it all in one place, because my filing cabinet/printer/etc is right there.
mine is the desk on the right
It’s in a big, huge room, which is AWESOME, but it’s at the back of our upstairs, and I just can’t feasibly go in there while Emma’s awake. I guess I could set her up some toys, but she likes to have space to run around and drag things, and there’s just not room for that up there right now.
Trust me, I’ve tried to let her play in there, but I just don’t have the time to kid-proof that room — and it’s impossible to get anything done when she’s in there.
Also, I’d have to go downstairs every time she wanted a snack or drink.
The thing is, I have pretty much 2 hours a day to do all of my deskwork, because the only time I have alone is when Emma naps.
I’ve also lost bills and important paperwork because it’ll come in our mail, I’ll put it in a pile to take upstairs, but then it never makes it upstairs. Or a bill doesn’t get paid in time because it’s stuck in the middle of a huge pile of things to take upstairs.
Also, my calendar program is on my desktop — I can’t move it to my laptop because I had to pay for it, and it’s too CPU-intensive for my netbook.
Honestly, I’ve tried several different ways of keeping everything straight, but nothing seems to work. Every month, I’m running around like a madman trying to get the bills paid in time, keep up with my calendar, etc.
So I was thinking about moving MY desk/office downstairs. I really don’t know how feasible this is, but I think it could work. My “job” is to be a mom while also keeping our house in shape, and since I do the mom thing downstairs, it would only make sense to have the housekeeping stuff downstairs as well, so I can do it all at once.
I know those of you who know me are thinking, “Oh, you’re just bored and want to move things around.” But it’s not that. I am just NOT getting things done.
Even if I do get to go upstairs to upload/edit pictures while she naps, I have to run downstairs to switch out the laundry, clean up the kitchen, get a drink, etc. It’s constantly up and down when I could just be downstairs doing it all.
Obviously, Ken is going to be highly annoyed at me for moving things around yet once again. I do this a lot. I’ve moved my sewing stuff around at least 5 times. I move Emma’s stuff around at least once a month. It drives him CRAZY. And I know that I normally do it because I’m bored or OCD about moving things around.
But I really think this could be a good move for me.
The problem we have is space. It definitely will not fit into our living room — E and I spend all day in here, and there just isn’t room for a desk/computer/filing cabinet in here.
Plus, my desk is huge. I guess I could move the smaller brown one down here, but I LOVE my desk.
Anyway, I’m thinking that it would probably go in the front room.
I could Craigslist the green sofa. I’ve had it ever since I lived on my own, and it doesn’t get used at all — except by the dogs. I’ve hesitated getting rid of it, because it’s going to be a huge pain to clean the dog hair off/out of it. But I could. AND that would be a little extra cash.
So then I’d probably move the piano that’s in front of the window over to where the sofa is and then put the desk in front of the window so I could look out over the neighborhood. Then, I could be the woman that everyone calls to find out what’s going on while they’re at work!! Just kidding.
I just don’t want to get everything downstairs and then decide that I would like it better upstairs.
I welcome your thoughts and opinions!
edited to add: I know we have, like, two rooms in our whole house painted, but that’s going to hopefully be one of our summer projects when Ken’s not teaching.
