Office bookshelf

I'm embarrassed to say that since we've moved into this house, our office area has been a mess. This is partly because we moved from a house with a 16' x 12' office with a 12' built-in floor to ceiling bookcase, full closet, and his and hers desks and filing cabinets. Now we share a small desk in a tiny space that is shaped like a triangle and not an equilateral or isosceles triangle, but an irregular scalene one. For an extra challenge with two "real walls" and the third open to the stair banister. But enough of the excuses, here's a before and after photo of the mess.

We painted the office walls a while back when my mother was visiting. Paint is always the first requirement for renovating a room here. The desk is against the top landing, with the printer adjacent to it, the window wall has one small bookcase holding a jumble of supplies and there are boxes of files, paper and other electronics stacked against the long wall - in short a disorganized mess! I had the idea a while back that a single long bookcase could solve the problem. My husband was a disbeliever. Over a two-week period I had the chance to sneak out to the garage during nap times to start building this thing. Because of my lumber diet (our beater of a farm truck didn't pass inspection and I don't have another way of transporting lumber at the moment), I had to use what was available to me. I had a piece of 3/4" thick plywood in the barn that I'd only cut the corner off of to make my potting bench. So I got to work with my early Mother's Day gift and built this.

Here's the new bookcase built from plywood and framed in pine 1"x 2"s.

I generally followed the plans from Ana White's website, Knockoff Wood for Grace's bookshelf. My shelf is sized for the space though and the materials I had on hand so the dimensions are about 60" wide by 32" tall. The cubes on the bottom are 15" x 15" x 13" deep.

Here it is all filled up with office supplies and ah- organized.

Because of the small space of the office, even with my widest angle lens, I couldn't fit the whole shelf and wall organizers in the photo. Above the wall is a file organizer on the left, a cork board in the center and a white board on the right. And yes, that is an outlet in the middle of the wall six feet high. The whole office has oddly placed outlets like that one.

Here's the window wall with the new curtains I sewed to match those on the stairwells. Perhaps you'll notice two more oddly placed outlets to the right of the window. At least the view from the window is great.

I'm very excited about having an organized space again with all of my files at my finger tips. Really I have to thank Ana White for showing me how easy it is to build solutions to all my problems. Thanks Ana!