Bjorn Again (office)

I easily spend more than half of the time when I am at home at my desk.  Actually it's sort of always been that way.  In the past, my home office was the closest I had to a "man cave".  Since moving in 2010, I have less space, and with just Jean Luc the cat and I, it works out just fine.  I do have a room for eating (I hesitate to call it a dining room, as that sounds far more impressive than the room actually is) and an extra room upstairs, but by and large I spend most of my time awake time in the room with my TV, a couch I rarely use, and a desk.



For space that I use quite a bit, my work area has always been something of a hodge-podge of oddly collected things.  Not  such of a plan or design as a "whatever I can acquire" kind of operation.  As evidence I offer the following...

Now in fairness, I had a larger desk, but it has been donated to the great cause known as my oldest daughter, who is furnishing an apartment in the far off land known as "Missouri".  Anyway, this is what has passed for "my old desk" over the past few weeks.  Functional, but not very impressive.

Enter the place where shopping becomes an experience, a place where you can find the very finest in Nordic ready-to-assemble home furnishing, IKEA.  With the able assistance of Ms Rivers (who I might add is not necessarily a fan of IKEA, as her tastes in furniture are, shall we say, a bit more "classic"), a trek was made to another far off land know as "Conshohocken", which happens to be the home of the second closest to Scranton IKEA.  The closest IKEA is actually in New Jersey, but I figure that taxes on everything in New Jersey are higher, so scratch that idea.

With a list in hand and the GPS to provide precise directions, we arrived at the IKEA and quickly found the desk and related components in the bowels of the Swedish flag colored store.

What you see on the cart includes the desk "Expedit" series (you can see it HERE), a related bookcase, a desk lamp and a file cabinet (HERE).  Note that it was actually bigger than it appeared on the cart, and getting all of it into a Toyota Camry required some ingenuity.

Fortunately we didn't need the backseat for anything other than Swedish ready-to-assemble office furniture.

Once home, I was  far too tired to do much of anything, so the actual "assemble" in "ready-to-assemble" took place on Saturday.

All told, I probably spend about 5 hours assembling the stuff, which I have to confess wasn't all that difficult, although I added a few of my own touches to the process.  It also helps that I have an more than a fair assortment of tools and drivers, so there isn't a need to rely on the cheesy Allen wrench that is provided in each package.

Today has been spent cleaning, moving, organizing, cleaning, discarding old stuff, cleaning and cleaning.  While I'm not ready to declare victory yet, things are taking shape.

It's big, it's white, and it's what I've wanted for a long time:  something functional and coordinated.  As I noted above, I spend a lot of time at "my old desk", and while my new desk isn't old, I am looking forward to having extra work-space.