Building my new office

With the arrival of Mia, my daughter, there has been a need to re-arrange some things in our house. For the past 18 months I have had my office upstairs across the hall from the master bed room taking up one of the 3 upstairs bedrooms in our home. We have been fortunate to have a lovely guest room in our basement for people to visit but with Jake, Sarah’s first cousin moving down to take care of Mia when Sarah goes back to work, it is going to be occupied.

With most of our family back in Canada, we still plan on having guests down and we need a place for them to sleep, we also might want to have another kid someday, so all signs were pointing to Luke needing to move his office. The question was to where?

When we bought the house there was an unfinished room where the furnace, the tankless hot water heater and a whole bunch of left over construction materials lived. The floor was poorly poured concrete and it had no windows. The one thing that it did have going for it was that it was close to the garage, and there was no way it could ever become a bedroom.

I decided this would be my new home at home and proceeded in figuring out what would be needed to make it happen. While my parents were out in mid-February, my father and I worked pretty hard at cleaning out all of the old construction materials, boards and shelves that the previous owner had left and had been left over from our renovation. Once that was done, he wired me up 2 new circuits so I would have lots of power available to my new room.

The next task was getting the floor fixed into something useful.I put a post out on Thumbtack, and got a reply pretty quickly from Matthew Kelly Construction who did a quick estimate and did the job a few days later.

Once I had a nice level floor I needed drywall and insulation, I reached out on Thumbtack and I got a quote from GMBC Construction to do just that. Over the course of about 4 days they framed, dry walled and painted my new office.

It was almost there, but had to take a few weeks break while I traveled to Florida for Atlassian App Week. Once I was back I took a look at the room and decid

ed that I wanted to get a laminate wood floor on it, to match Sarah’s office. I purchased all the materials from Home Depot and was all ready to do it myself when I tried cutting my first board of the 12mm laminate – it did not go well.

I made the executive decision of hiring back the company who did a great job on Sarah’s office last year, Magical Flooring.

They came in, did a quick look at the place and my materials and quoted me a reasonable price. They were back the next day and by 9:00 that night I had a brand new floor in my office.

After that, it was just a bit of clean up and for me to move in!

The rest of the project is DIY. I have put up a track curtain to hide my furnace and hot water heater, but still leaving them with easy access. Next up is a door replacement with a sliding book case, but more on that in a future post.