Tuesday 24 November 2009

Moving swiftly on...........

Back to work with a vengeance today....orders to package, invoices to process, so no time as yet to get to grips with restocking the website.

However, to balance my deficiencies in that department, a vital element of one of my forthcoming projects has unexpectedly fallen into place, thanks to the wondrous Freecycle.

To explain..... our workroom is a reasonable size but our office/study is tiny and subsequently crammed chock-a-block full of all the office paraphernalia required to run a small business.

We already have a rather lovely solid wood pedestal desk and two matching filing cabinets, but they are really too big for the tiny space. PP has the use of the desk for the office computer, but for the past six years I have been forced to work at my laptop on a very small, flimsy folding tray table, only marginally bigger than the laptop, crammed uncomfortably into a small area in front of one of the filing cabinets. As a result I have nowhere to lay out books, papers, notebooks etc, so they usually end up in a teetering pile on the floor.

Quite why I have endured this situation for 6 years I cannot fathom, but as of now I have had enough and have petitioned for a complete re-organisation of the room so that I can have some proper desk space. To this end, we will be relocating the desk and filing cabinets elsewhere in the house and replacing them with one large desk which will fit all along one wall in the office and allow both of us space to work properly. We will also be doing away with a tall bookcase which is always overflowing with stuff, and replacing it with something sleek and streamlined, with drawers and cupboards, within which all the dispossessed 'stuff' can be hidden out of sight.

While we're at it, the scruffy old carpet will have to go and we might slap a few coats of paint on the walls to freshen them up a bit. I have a vision of a neat and tidy office, much more conducive to creative endeavour than the current unholy guddle.

So..... when PP saw that someone on Freecycle was giving away a large beech topped desk this morning, fortunately she spotted it and was able to respond within the 'golden 15 seconds' before the world and his brother saw it too.
Measurements were requested and supplied and miraculously, it appeared that it would fit perfectly into the space available. So we arranged to go and have a look.

10 minutes later we were unsuccessfully struggling to fit one large, unassembled desk into our tiny car. The legs and back panel fitted in fine, but the desktop wouldn't fit no matter which configuration we tried.

20 minutes later we had returned home to get the campervan in order to retrieve the desktop.

30 minutes later we had successfully unloaded the desktop, plus legs etc and it is now leaning up against the wall in the dining room, pending further developments.

Of course in order to establish the new desk in situ, the old one will have to be emptied, drawer by drawer, and all the extraneous stuff dispensed with. Ditto the four drawers of the filing cabinets, in which there are invoices, accounts and tax stuff going back decades, and which I can probably safely dispose of. Ditto the bookcase, the whole bottom shelf of which holds several hundred vinyl LPs which may themselves find their way onto Freecycle in due course.

However, I can sort through a drawer or shelf each day for the next week or so, by which time we may have reached some agreement about the relocation of the desk.

Another positive knock-on effect is that we are both going to get new office chairs. Plush and comfortable, ergonomically designed with proper back support and everything!

I am sooooo looking forward to having a lovely, sparkling, uncluttered office space. Best of all, in the process, I get to visit stationery/office stores (my secret guilty pleasure!) in search of new chairs and useful, coordinated, storage and stationery organisers.

Be still my beating heart...........I LOVE STATIONERY!

No comments: