when i last posted a picture of the office, it looked like this:

lately, it's actually been more like this:


rug covered in cat/dog hair while the vacuum cleaner is in the room so there are no excuses as to why it's not more fur free? check.

overflow books stacked in the window that you can clearly see from the outside, making us look oh so classy? check.

not one, but two unplugged lamps, one of which is broken? check.

bookshelf sitting 1' off of the wall because there are no baseboards along that wall and we don't want to put the bookshelf in place in fear that we'll cover the bookshelf with stuff and therefore never finish the baseboards? check. (trust me on this one, it's on the wall you can't see. and yes, it's been that way since last april).

towel covering part of the window to help block the light/cold air? normally check, but i was doing some laundry and decided to wash the towel. but it was dark blue, imagine it shoved behind those lovely books.

you might remember that last spring we installed crown molding in this room, and replaced portions of the baseboard and shoe molding. we were having trouble matching stain/finishes between the old and new woodwork and we got frustrated and gave up... for 9 months. a few weeks ago we decided that maybe the stain was not as far off as we first thought. we decided to go ahead and install everything and live with it and see how much it bothers us. i have a feeling that it will bother us a lot less attached to the wall than it did sitting in the basement :-)

after finishing up with the baseboards on saturday, we were motivated to keep working on this room. so we hung up the ikea curtains that had been in our dining room and removed the old broken roller blinds.



we even hung up a picture:


and unpacked a few more boxes!


organizing the shelf is a work in progress, i have a lot of oversized architecture books that will eventually be on this shelf. we also have some other things we want to hang on the wall, and we still need to get a new overhead light and roller blinds for the windows. but this room actually feels done now, and that is a great feeling.

by the way, we tried to rearrange this room before putting it all back together and couldn't come up with anything better. it's a decent sized room, but both the desk and the shelf are 5' long and with the 3 doors (exterior, room, and closet), radiator, and window... this seems to be the best solution. when we first bought the house we thought that this room would be our guest room, but i couldn't even imagine trying to figure out how to fit a bed in here!