Deciding how to turn a simple square room into an office should not be this hard. I’m pretty sure of that. We probably would’ve finished it months ago if we didn’t have to, you know, make decisions first.

Sometimes it’s so hard to be a grown-up!

As a reminder, this is what the room looks like today:

And here’s the floor plan:

And here’s the room in 3D:

WHOOOOOA. Hold on a sec.

YES. I just went 3D all up in here, just threw it out there casually like it’s no big deal. (Then ruined it by making it a big deal. But isn’t that flipping sweet? I played around with floorplanner.com and got a little carried away.) Let’s move on.

We started by evaluating what we need from this room:

• Space for a desktop computer and monitor
• A new hidden home for our electronics zoo
• Loads and loads of storage for filing cabinets, art supplies and random pieces of useless paper like expired coupons and old college exams that shouldn’t still be here.
• Open shelving for storage pretty things.

Our first idea was to add built-in bookshelves on the long wall, with a floating desk facing the door, kinda like this:

We didn’t go with this option because:

• We didn’t love the idea of having the ugly backside of a computer monitor right in your face when you walk in the room.
• It would require moving the electronics zoo across the room – which is apparently a big deal, according to my tech support guy husband.
• The shelves would’ve had to be narrower than we’d like so they don’t protrude past the windows.
• Andy really wanted to find a way to face the windows while sitting at the computer. Since he uses the desktop computer more than I do – I live and die by the laptop-on-the-sofa method – he definitely gets a majority vote.

Back to the drawing board. We moved the bookshelves to the short wall to avoid running into the window, and moved the desk to the corner so you could almost face the windows while sitting there:

Eh. Getting closer – this was Andy’s favorite plan because of the window thing, but we ruled it out in the end because:

• It felt like an awkward, unbalanced use of the room, even if we added a sofa or something in front of the windows.
• The desk would’ve been shorter and smaller than what we really wanted.

Finally we realized that the bookshelves have to go on the short wall to accommodate our giant pile of electronics, and there’s just no way to position the computer so you can face the windows while you’re using it without having to see the back of the monitor when you walk in the room. We moved on to this plan:

Option 3 removes the computer-monitor-and-wires-in-your-face problem, gives us storage on that wall where we need it, and floats a desk in the middle of the room for doing important paperwork like sorting through receipts for things we don’t even own anymore. It’s not ideal – you can’t face the windows while working on the computer, and putting the bookshelves on the short wall limits our storage – but it’s the best idea we’ve found so far.

Here’s a picture of a room that has a similar layout:

via decorpad, credit Carter & CompanyImagine the computer monitor going in the little cove where that pretty piece of art is in this image, and it’ll give you a better idea of how our office would work.

The next step is designing the bookshelf wall… unless you can think of a better layout that we’re just not seeing? People who read this blog are proven to be at least 56 percent more brilliant than the rest of the population, so I know if there’s a better solution, you’ll have it!