Home office, second post

I’ll have little Internet access for the coming several days as we finish clearing out my office so we can fix the walls. Textured wallpaper over badly patched 140-year-old bare horsehair plaster will soon be a memory. The vinyl tiles and plywood on the floor are already gone, revealing face-nailed painted barn boards. We’ll pry those up and see if we have to replace the subfloor. Which requires choosing a new floor, so we know what thickness of subfloor to install.

I’m trying out the decision to use real wood for the floor, with rugs to protect the floor from the office chairs. Cork is still tempting for its insulating and noise-reducing properties, as well as its environmental benefits, but I haven’t found one that looks appropriate for an office in an old home. And I’ve always loved wood floors. Maybe a wide plank, to follow the old tradition of using wider boards for upstairs rooms and narrower boards for downstairs rooms and to echo the old barn boards that were first used in the room. And a light color to keep the room feeling more open. It’s not my original plan of matching the oak strip flooring with a medium tone that we have on the first floor, but I know that I want to keep the room feeling fresh and modern rather than like a stuffy old library.

I love stuffy old libraries. One of the show rooms that I looked at yesterday was a stuffy old library, with wood paneling and dark shelving and heavy trim and a leather couch and a fireplace, and it was lovely. The elegant walnut strip flooring in the room was gorgeous, and I just wanted to settle in with a good book and a cup of cocoa, preferably while a snowstorm settled in outside. But that style doesn’t work as an office for me. I need lots of illumination, because a lot of my work is still looking at details on paper (which does not yet come with its own internal light source). And I work best in an environment where I feel like it’s ok to play music loudly sometimes, even if I mostly prefer to work in a quiet environment. I love the quiet of libraries, but that quiet is too salient to allow me to focus on work.

What I really want is for someone else to come in and choose a floor the room, and tell me to live with it. That would be great.