After a week of having a bookcase sitting squarely in the middle of my office (don’t ask), yesterday the Grand Office Redesign of 2010 was completed. Basically I spent half the day wallowing and the other half realizing that my aversion to the work of getting reorganized was steadily being outweighed by the annoyance of HAVING A BOOKCASE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOM OH MY GOD.

Plus, you know, it was really stressing out the dog. The bookcase was creating a wall between the futon where she likes to snooze all day and the chair at my new desk, so she couldn’t BOTH be a slug AND keep watch over me, so she was spending the day bouncing back and forth between the futon (comfort! but lack of watchdog capability!) and trying to sleep directly under my feet (cramped! and with accompanying cranky human!).

Anyway, it’s all done. I mean, it’s mostly done. Look, if you walk into the room, it totally looks like we set it up this way on purpose, and there aren’t any extraneous pieces of furniture hulking aimlessly in the middle of the floor for no apparent reason. That has to count for something.

And really, I rather like my new location in the room; I’m a little further from the door, so I don’t get run over when Monkey comes careening inside at top speed and hurls his backpack in my general direction. My new desk, being kind of a big curve—not really an L, but more like a stumpy V—not only gives me a lot more surface area, but also sort of encloses me a bit in a way that I find pleasing for some reason. (Must be all those years of turning small spaces into “forts” when I was a kid.) And now I’m right next to the window, which is lovely because it’s sunny and windy.

Er, really. It’s windy. Right here at my desk.

One of the joys of older houses in the south, I’m finding, is that the windows tend to be a little drafty. It’s as though the builders realized it was never going to get THAT cold, so why bother, you know, keeping the weather all the way out? they’re keeping it mostly out. That’s good enough, right?

My office is the coldest room in the house in the winter and the warmest room in the summer. I know this. Still, it was a little disconcerting, this morning, to actually watch my little stack of Post-Its flutter in the breeze.

I’ve decided to tell myself that my newly revamped office just happened to come with the unexpected benefit of being JUST LIKE getting outside for some fresh air every day. Yeah, that’s it.

A few other things that required a quick trip through the Spin Machine in association with the new digs:

1) Otto got his fancy new saw and promptly sawed a hole in my new desk. In the wrong place. The look on his face when he realized what he’d done was both so pitiful and so entertaining to me, I wasn’t even mad. He stuck one of those plastic cover things into the hole and now if I ever want to run some cords in a totally random location, I can! The second hole worked out a lot better, and my tangle of cords is happily ensconced. I’ve decided to tell myself that this extraneous bit of plastic here on the desk is a symbol of my darling’s love for me, that he was so blinded by my beauty he ended up misjudging the mark there somehow. (And now every time I look at it, I laugh.)

2) I always tease Otto about his office being furnished in “dorm room chic,” but when we got all done in here last night I realized that the ugly formica shoe cubby thingie is more prominent than ever, in here, and that it’s totally disrupting my illusion of the office finally looking like, you know, an OFFICE. I’ve decided to tell myself that the fact that you open the door towards said cubbies means that actually, they’re invisible. Tralalala!

3) I didn’t really ever finish unpacking my old desk. I sorted through a ton of junk and threw away a giant bag of crap and filed a bunch of stuff and put some other stuff away, and then I just reached a point where my brain was full and I couldn’t deal with it anymore, and I swept everything that was left into a box and put the box in the closet. If you walk into my office and then help yourself to a peek inside my closet well, then, you’re kind of a presumptuous, overstepping jerk and you deserve to see the mess in there. Right? Right.

4) I may have shoved a bunch of OTHER stuff into the closet, too. See number 3, and keep your mitts off my closet.

5) In lieu of a plastic tower of drawers, Otto actually found me a nice wooden set of drawers to park under one corner of my desk, and it’s all kinds of awesome because instead of a big drawer and a little drawer or even three medium drawers, it’s actually six pretty shallow drawers. Which theoretically means I can stay completely organized, now, as it’s utterly impossible to throw something into one of these drawers and have it sink from view. I very carefully designated each drawer for various things, and now whenever I need something, instead of digging through one drawer, I get to open six different drawers while trying to remember where the hell I put the thing that I need. That’s SO much better.

6) While shoving Things I Don’t Feel Like Dealing With Right Now into the closet, we had to arrange some of the Things I Didn’t Feel Like Dealing With When We First Moved In, and in doing so we unearthed my long-lost Nunzilla. She is enjoying the cool breeze wafting across my desk quite a lot, and I feel that once you have a fire-breathing nun standing sentry in your workspace, you’ve obviously done something right. So.

I was sitting here this morning, shivering in the breeze just a little, looking around at my nice clean desk, my organized bookshelves, the carefully placed knick-knacks, and how the flow of the room is really ever so much nicer, now. Of course, in doing so, I also realized that I’ve always hated the color of the walls in here. We really should’ve painted before we moved everything. (That sound you just heard was Otto smacking his forehead really, really hard.)

Now I’m just going to go grab a pair of gloves, and get back to work.