A Tale of Writing Spaces

I love that laptops and tablets have made it easy to write anywhere. That wasn’t always the case. Jane Austen may have written some of her novels at a little table. Gentlemen might have a lap desk to carry with them when travelling and much larger desks at their homes. This lady philosopher is said to have gone into raptures after solving a knotty problem at her desk. 

Mine is a different tale. I didn’t have a desk at home growing up. We did our homework and wrote our papers on the kitchen table. I scribbled in notebooks and journals. Sometime in high school, I figured out how to take two particle-board bookcases, turn them side by side, put a plank across one end, and make my own desk. Surrounded by books, I typed stories on an ancient Remington that had belonged to my grandmother. My parents were convinced to purchase me an electric typewriter when I started college.

That funky little make-shift desk followed me from home to my first apartment to a better apartment in another part of the state. A slightly bigger version held the massive electronic typewriter that showed a full sentence at a time—imagine!—and then an actual word processor.

It wasn’t until my sons were in elementary school that my wonderful husband insisted on a real desk for me, oak, with a hutch over the top to store books and room for a printer as well as a computer. And we added three floor-to-ceiling oak bookcases to match. Oh, the luxury. My office grew from a corner of the bedroom to a bedroom of its own—first the smallest, then the mid-size as one son went off to college and finally the largest room when they both left home.

Five and a half years ago, we moved across the state to a smaller house and a fixer-upper at that. I took the smallest room for my office, but it is a very nice size with plenty of room for desk and bookcases. But immediately we ran into problems. My lovely bookcases wouldn’t fit through the door upright, and the turning radius was too narrow to allow them to be angled in, from any angle. We ended up bringing them in through the window, with a burly mover inside and out. They will not be moving until other burly movers appear.

Next, my floor plan was stymied by a defunct baseboard heater. It sticks out six inches from the wall under the window. We should have removed it before bringing in the furnishings, but there were those handy burly movers about. So, a second desk now presses up against it, and the floor plan mostly works.

The third problem we have yet to master. You see, the room used to belong to a teenager with a vivid imagination and an indulgent father. She painted two of the walls teal, two turquoise, and added random hot pink circles of various sizes wherever she fancied. And she painted all the wood trim and the defunct heater purple. (I did mention the house was a fixer-upper.) I fully intended to paint it (a nice Wedgwood blue, perhaps?), but I realized I would have to empty and re-position those bookcases again.

The décor is growing on me.