Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 302

The Office Day 9: Das Desk

Krissie got here yesterday which is good because I see things through her eyes and think, “Okay, that has to be done.” Also she almost died trying to get from the kitchen to the office yesterday, so really it’s time to go back to work there. I let everything here go to catch up with other things, but almost losing a sister in the debris means it’s time to get back to work. Also I really, really need my office.

The most important part of an office is the work surface. So of course that’s the part that’s giving me the most trouble. When I bought the house which had been unoccupied for several years, I told them not to bother moving the contents out because there was this fabulous old blond teacher’s desk with even more fabulous clear Lucite knobs and it was going to fit almost perfectly in the space in the pantry that was to become my office. Then I left for Ohio and when I came back it was gone. Still don’t know what happened to it and I’m still bitter. I’d spent a long time scraping the blistered veneer off the top to put new on, and the desk would have been amazing.

Let go of the desk, Jenny.

Then I bought a cheapo one-drawer desk at Home Depot ($150) and I liked it a lot, but it wasn’t right for the space, too light and only one drawer. It’s going to be a magnificent sewing table so that’s all right, but still, I need a desk. And I have no money. I do have two mismatched end tables with drawers, but one is an inch shorter than the other and both of them are too short to support a top that had to be 30″ off the ground. Still, you work with what you’ve got, so I spray painted both of them black (Rustoleum Ultra, I love you),

Once I had them painted, I put 1x4s on the sides to raise the tops, and then scrap boards across the top of the shorter one to bring it up to the height of the other. In a miracle, that actually made them level. I did have to turn one of the cabinets sidesways to make it fit which means its three drawers become secret spaces under the desk. Well, not secret to anybody who looks under the desk but still out of the way.

Then I cut a 24″ wide board to put across the top. I like it, but it needs to be twice as thick. Fortunately I have another one that I got to put across the top of the printer bureau on the other side of the room that I decided not to use, so later today, I will cut that one down. Then I’ll screw the piece I have on there now onto the support boards and glue the second piece to the top of that. Then a lot of gloss white paint and I’ll finally have a desk. Here’s the desk in progress:

Over the desk I needed a big cork board because that’s how I keep the truly urgent things in mind and how I keep the notes to myself on stories and projects. I’ve already got a good-sized decoupaged-with-fabric one on the door to the garage, but I need much more so I’m recycling my old standby corkboard to go behind the desk. I’ve repainted that thing so many times, it’s never going to die: the paint will keep it together. This time I-mod podged the pink fabric on the frame (I’d just done the door and I was on a roll), but the board itself is white because the room has enough color in it.

Across the middle of the corkboard is a shelf for the collage for the book I’m working on now. I have the board and supports to put a shelf over the corkboard but I decided not to because most of my collages are taller than this one, plus I wanted one wall with no shelf looming over me. I’m going to have to move the lamps up to get the second desk top in, I think, and that’ll mean moving a clipboard and my Marilyn quote*, but this side of the office is very close to being finished:

Then I can put my computer and monitor on there, plug them in, and see if I killed one of them when I dropped it. Always something to look forward do at Squalor on the Lake.

Please note the lighting: two plug-in Real Simple white wall lamps on swing arms with these great shades that are covered at the bottom so you don’t look up into a bare bulb. There’s a different fancier one that’s twice as much that I didn’t see when I bought these two months ago and that I’m investing in when my money shortage eases, but these are perfect for this small office. Plus, they plug in so I could install them (and now probably reinstall them) myself. Bonus: the switch gives me both dim and bright options. I love these lamps.

It’s still a mess in there, but I’m getting so much closer. Finish the desk, put a shelf over the opening to the kitchen, make curtains, possibly hang a small shelf to get the router off the printer surface, finish cutting the last two carpet tiles . . . really, I’m very close. The place looks like a seraglio done by Staples, but I think it’s the New Me: Wildly Romantic and Colorful. Or at least that’s the kind of book I want to write in future.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish the desk. If I say that here, I’ll have to finish it. Of course that involves the use of my jigsaw and I’ll probably cut my arm off, but hey, anything for Argh.

*The quote is “I don’t want to make money, I just want to be wonderful.” Who knew Marilyn and I were soulmates? Although I wouldn’t turn down money if it turned up, and I suspect Marilyn didn’t, either.

Amazon Daily Deal: Gaffney’s Outlaw in Paradise!

Right now, today, Monday, Pat Gaffney’s Outlaw in Paradise is a Daily Deal at Amazon. It’s wildly romantic and funny as hell, and one of my faves, especially its hero who rides into town wearing all black on a black horse smoking a black cigarette. Really, you have to read this one, and at $1.99, it’s a steal:

When Jesse Gault saunters into Paradise, Oregon, with a gun on each hip, the town is instantly abuzz. What could a legendary gunslinger want in Paradise? And what will the townsfolk have to do to keep his trouble from becoming their own? Cady McGill, proprietor of the Rogue Tavern, thinks she may know what Gault has come for, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

Cady’s ongoing battle with Merle Wylie, who has been buying up or burning down properties all over town, is coming to a head, as Wylie tries to get his hands on her tavern and her dried-up gold mine. Hiring a gunfighter like Gault would be just Wylie’s speed. But Cady senses something else behind Gault’s mysterious façade, and as the two grow closer she learns that his closely guarded secrets could spell life or death for the town—and for Cady herself.

ETA: Lily is $1.99, too! It’s Gaffney’s excursion into Gothic. Off to buy it now.

The Office Day 8: A Plan Would Be Good

So after the plague and the blizzard and the major surgery on my dog and the decoupaged door in pink, it’s time to get serious about the office. It’s time to figure out what I need in there besides a pink door, it’s time to make a PLAN.

First of all, I have to recognize that I don’t do file cabinets. Even if I set them up, if I file something it’s gone forever because I never open the cabinet again, and if I don’t file something, it’s gone forever because I lose it in the mess. Also I hate filing cabinets. Basically, I need to see my work there in front of me or I’ll forget where I put it and that it exists, so my solution is clipboards. I love clipboards. Really, they’re just giant binder clips, and we all know how I feel about binder clips.

So from now on I’m going to sort all my Work In Progress papers on clipboards, of which I have many, all in bright colors, and of which I just made two more from $3 Walmart clear clip boards using the duvet fabric. My god, there’s miles of that fabric. I hung the clipboards on the narrow side walls which aren’t any good for anything else anyway.

Then there are my tools: pens, pencils, scissors, markers, all sitting in a plastic organizer on my very small desk. I need to get that stuff off my work space, but it has to be close at hand. Then the other day I was in a discount store and saw this beat-up plant hanger thingy on clearance, and I had a Eureka moment: hang it on the wall, put glasses in the metal circles, and fill the glasses with all my tools, which would be at hand but not on the desk. Except that didn’t really work, so I took the whole thing apart and just used the metal hangers: one was perfect for the door and the other for the space under the light.

I added one shelf over the door to make the entry look more impressive and to hold my storage boxes (camera equipment, collage tools and supplies, etc.) and I mod podged a switch plate for when my contractor gets around to fixing that weird switch layout, and now I have a filing and storage wall with a door to the garage and some corkboard, too. Bonus: I found my tax stuff in the mess on the desk. It’s on a clipboard now.

Now all I have to do is the same thing on the other side with the opening to the kitchen, and the office is half finished. Okay, the other two walls are a lot more complicated but still, four walls, one mostly done. I’m very proud.

Day 7: Pink Is Not My Color, But It’s Evidently the Girls’ . . .

I never buy pink anything except for a cheapo pink and white polka-dot collar for Mona which amused me because Mona is the least pink poodle I’ve ever met. Mona should have a black leather collar with studs and a tattoo that says “Born To Kick Deer Ass and Take Delivery Men Names.” Mona may be the smallest of the dogs, but if any of the others cross her, she turns into that poodle from the penguin’s Christmas movie, all teeth and enraged black eyes, and the others back off because you do NOT screw with Mona. Whenever I get to feeling defeated, I think of Mona, taking no crap from anybody, bounding through life with the certainty that God made this patch of grass just for her, and I think, “At least I have kneecaps” and keep on trucking.

Where was I? Oh, right, I don’t do pink.

But things have been tense for awhile here, so when I absent-mindedly impulsed a marked-down $25 duvet cover and pillow shams because it was warm and bright, I didn’t even think about it being pink and orange until I got it home and stuck it in the mess that is the office and noticed that it went really well with the boxes I’d bought last year. They’re pink, too. Which is when I started to think about why the Girls were buying all these hot colors for a very small house that is almost entirely white with some blue and yellow dropped in so the place doesn’t look like a snowstorm.

Part of is that I am an Old. At 63, according to what I’ve read, I don’t see colors as brightly as I did at 23, so I now gravitate to more intense colors. Given how rapidly my eyes are failing due to age–I can’t read without glasses any more, damn it–with the extra kick of the AMD, I am willing to believe that that’s part of it, but it’s not all of it.

The truth is, as much as I love the rest of the house–the parts that are painted anyway–and as much as I am grateful for the quiet of all the white and pale blue and pale yellow (it’s called Champagne Tickle, which is probably why I picked it), it was starting to make me twitch. I know once I drag in all the yarn and the folk art, it’s going to be brighter, but until then, it’s just . . . white.

But once I dumped all the pink in that tiny, tiny room between the kitchen (all white with one pale blue wall) and the garage (will be all white one day), it felt right. It’s off at the end of the kitchen so it’s not going to fight with any of the colors in the other rooms, it gives that cold little room a warm glow, and it reminds me that I’m a romance writer and a women’s fiction writer. I’m not a romantic any more than I’m a pink person, but I didn’t sit down to write fiction until I read a romance novel at 41, romance is where my Girls live, and I think they just wanted a work space that reflected that, so they decided to spruce up my plan for a black and white office. Since it was pretty drab . . .

They went with a little pink which turned into a lot of pink and orange, and now thanks to one manic night, I have a decoupaged door and corkboard as the first color in my office (yes, it still needs one more coat of Mod Podge; I’m on it):

Go big or go home, that’s what I say. My next move: paint the window frame hot pink. The Girls are going to LOVE it.

The Office: Day Screw It, I’m Not Counting Any More

Honestly, the plague topped off by a blizzard has pretty much ended any illusion that there was a steady progression here. We are FINALLY recovered, just in time for Krissie to head home on Tuesday (she was supposed to go a week ago but then Trouble Ensued), so I’m back to work, which means I’m unpacking the office while I actually do work, so I’ll keep posting on what I’m doing, but the Twelve Days is laughable now.

On the monitors: One is a desk top Mac; the other is the monitor that my laptop plugs into. Why do I need a monitor for a laptop? Because I’m getting old, my eyesight has gotten much worse, and that monitor is a lot bigger than my laptop screen. Why do I need two big monitors? Because sometimes I work with a lot of documents. I can pull up my Voodoo Pad or Scrivener files on one screen and write the story on the other. I can pull up images on one and refer to them on the other. I can run a chat on one screen and refer to documents on the other. Really, how do you all function without two? Oh, right, you’re young and you have good eyes and you’re probably more organized than I am. (The third monitor is just the laptop screen, so it’s a dupe of the big one on the right.)

Quilt over the door: This would be an excellent idea except this is a really small office and I need all the wall space. The door is just the part of the wall that swings. I could hang something over the garage side, though. That could be a very good idea. Or I could get one of the old doors currently leaning against the wall in the basement and see if that’s warmer although that would involve a contractor and money which is in short supply at the moment. The floor in here is absolutely icy, so more layers there would be a good idea, too. Cogitating here.

Bendy power strip/surge protector: I love those things. Never an unusable outlet on them. Of course I also love the ones that look like people and dogs. I’m a sucker for surge protectors.

Dog: Milton hurt his back. He’s a dachshund so that’s a big deal. There’s an operation that will put him back to normal but it’s expensive and he needs it fast. So now cogitating on that. Of course, if I’d write a damn book, this wouldn’t be a problem. No worries, I will solve this.

Normal: Moved in, virus defeated, now sitting up and typing without dizziness or nausea, faculties returned to as normal as they ever were . . . nothing but good times ahead.

Day Six: Snowstorm

I’m still aching but the good news is, there’s a blizzard headed my way. And me with an antique furnace and a sick dog, not to mention a friend recovering from a virus (“Come down and stay with me in the cottage, we’ll have fun . . . blearg”), so now that I’m semi-back on my feet, I had to go out and haul salt and firewood and corn muffins and quilting magazines (guests do not live by muffins alone), all of which means the office is once again on the back burner.

However I did manage to pry my ass off my recovery bed long enough to do some work. It still looks like hell but my office chair is in there and the computers are set up. I’ll get the printers going today. The furniture is painted. The carpet is mostly down (gotta love carpet squares). The door to the garage is still a cold hollow core nightmare, so I’ll have to do something about that, and I have to start putting things away very soon because I’m tired of falling over boxes of office supplies, but hey, there’s some progress even if it isn’t pretty.

And since I got firewood, I won’t have to burn the desk to keep warm if the power and/or furnace goes out. So overall, it’s a win.

The office at this point (the meds belong to the dog):

Day Five: Norovirus

It’s not the flu. Blearg. And now Krissie has it. So the office is on hold until I can stand up again.

One damn thing after another.

Day Four: Flu

Don’t even ask. It’s been vile.

But the good news is that Krissie, goddess that she is, worked on the office, moving in printers and futzing around with the electrical, so tomorrow’s post will show a lot of progress even if I divided my day between moaning in my bed and vomiting all over my shower-bathroom (and the bathroom is fabulous which was such a comfort). TMI? Hell, I didn’t want to know about it. Thank God for Krissie, who was a saint.

Tomorrow: shelves maybe, if I can move again.

Day Three: Paint Covers Everything

I love paint. Nothing changes a room faster than a change of color, plus it tends to hide mistakes beautifully. Of course in the case of this office, we’re talking about raw drywall and an old wood floor covered with mastic from some truly terrible linoleum, now mercifully gone, a blue-green ceiling, a cheap cherry-woodish desk and an ancient bureau that came with the house.

At two AM this morning I was putting the second coat of Porter Paint Cloud White on the walls and woodwork. It’s actually Signature paint, but the people at Lowe’s will match any manufacurter’s color so good for them. So one coat of primer plus two coats of Cloud White and it looked like a room instead of a hallway.

I love paint. But I especially love spray paint. I would spray paint everything if I could, but it’s expensive and I have never managed to get one of those refillable spray painters to work, so I have to save spray paint for small projects like the cheapo desk I bought at Home Depot on a whim. It went together easily and it’s remarkable solid for $149, but it was stained wood, and at $149, we’re not talking amazing wood grain. Which was okay because I wanted it black so one can of spray paint later, I have a black desk. Then there was the old bureau the sellers left in the house:

The price is right: free. And it fits almost perfectly against the window wall. But ugly. So more of that great spray paint (I’m in love with Rustoleum Ultra) and I have the start on a decent storage unit. That’s it to the right. Really, I love paint.

Okay, it’s still chaos. But one more day and I’ll be able to set up my printers and scanner and computers and be able to FIND things again. After that, it’s just figuring out how to put everything somewhere.

Day Two: We Moved

I had plans. Big plans. Move in on Thursday, paint the office, paint the furniture, put up the bulletin board . . .

So when we finished moving on FRIDAY, I spent the evening trying to find things, keeping the dogs from freaking, and watching Mentalist re-runs with Krissie to keep myself from freaking. Today, we’re running around getting computer cords and warmer clothes because the temp dropped to fifteen degrees and Krissie didn’t bring heavy sweats, and I can’t find anything, and then once we get the temporary kitchen set up, I am all about the office. The carpet squares arrived so there should be nothing keeping me from putting it all together this week. Except Fate, of course.

Here’s the office as it is right now. It’ll be better soon. (Deep breaths, Susan, deep breaths.)

Oh and big props to Krissie who got the wireless working right away. The woman is a goddess. (Pics of the rest of the chaos on ReFab; I know you guys are only interested in office chaos, but for those of you who want to see the move-in chaos of the rest of the place . . .)