Working From Home (my Office needs help)

Last Spring I made a big jump:  I changed jobs.  The new job has lots of perks: better pay, super flexible hours, a terrific CEO and manager, and a super short commute.

In fact, the commute is about 15 seconds, right down the stairs.

That's right, I'm working from my basement.  There's lots of good things to working at home.  I get to join my family for lunch.  If I have a brilliant idea for my work in the evening, I can just hop downstairs to try it.  I can work over my kids nap-times on my day off.  I'm still working just 20 hours per week, and we're still living on just the half-time income.  We find it rather do-able, and love being able to share

But I thought I'd show you the one bad thing about working from home.

My office is messy!

Yes, this is the real thing today.  I didn't messy it up for the picture, it's really this cluttered.  It started out nice, neat and organized - very efficient for working.  It became a dumping place for any and everything.

On one wall is the piano and music stuff.

On the next wall is my work desk.

To the left of that, all the stuff related to Children's Ministry at my church, then a box of home-canned goods that I couldn't find space for elsewhere.


In the middle is a box of clothes that needs sorted so that it will fit back in the box (then put away in the next room).   The window has a nice view of the neighbor's tree, but it's frame is unfinished.  It has nice wood floors, covered by a rug that got left here.  All in all: too much stuff, not enough organization.

Perhaps Mandi can help?


Here's the things I love about this space:

Hand-drawn pictures from Paris.

  

Hand-drawn pictures from my kids.

 

Yes, all my favorite things are handmade in one way or another.  Even the piano, the action of which I rebuilt myself while I was expecting our oldest child.

Oh, and maybe my favorite thing about my home office:

The door. It's salvaged from an old hotel - room 308.  It closes and locks, making my home office a place where I can concentrate and work while I'm at work.

I love working from home.  I love being so near my family during the day.  With an office-space spruce-up, it would be a slice of heaven down there.  Here's the slice-of-heaven view out of my unfinished window.

Painting

A good friend gave us a pack of canvases for Christmas - nice, square ones that we could paint.  There was one for each of us.

So the other day we broke out the acrylic paints and went to town.  I showed the kids some "inspiration" beforehand, but each came up with their own ideas.


Bennet did this one.  I think he was inspired a bit by Kandinsky

Lisel did this one, she was going for something like Kandinsky too.

Josephine did this one, she painted exactly what she wanted - no inspiration necessary.

Matthias did this one.  He was inspired by Josephine's.

And Tommy's was really neat looking, but then he kept painting over and over with new colors of wet paint.  We like it just the same.

And I did this one.  It was sort of inspired by Georgia Okeefe - but I didn't manage to get the flower huge enough.  The background was the most fun to paint.  Now I just want to paint abstract repeating patterns all over :)

I think this the first time painting canvas for us all -- and we had a blast!

Isn't that a terrific gift?!

Oh, and I started a new blog.  It's over here.  Each week I challenge myself to set aside a bit of time to create something with a theme, and invite others to join it.   This week's theme is to create something inspired by an Artist or a work of art.  So I'm entering this on my other blog.