Is there such thing as a dream workspace? Can we spend too long planning and setting up a space and lose sight of the main purpose of it?
Since I started writing regularly ten or so months ago, I’ve thought a lot about the environment we write and create in. Until July 2023, I had a full-time teaching job, so I was out of the house all day on weekdays and had no option to work from home. I didn’t need a home workspace.
When we started to renovate our house in 2018, we had no idea that a pandemic-induced home-working revolution was coming our way, but we did plan to have one room which would house our upright piano, store sheet music, and have a desk in it for any occasions that we did need to do ‘work’ at home. It was, by chance, finished in February 2020.
Since 2020 the study/music room has been in constant use. During the various lockdowns, I taught my lessons from that room and now my husband’s job requires him to work from home almost 100% of the time and so he uses this room daily. He too plays the piano and it’s turned out to be a nice way for him to break up the working day by pausing every now and then to tinkle the ivories.
Nowadays, I do work from home for around half the week. I’ve currently got a desk, or should I say an old table, set up in our spare bedroom. I use a dining chair, which is quite uncomfortable for long periods, and whenever we have guests I have to move out.
It’s been a year of firsts. As well as discovering the joy of writing, I have set up an interior design business. It’s early days for this new venture but even in the 10 months of trading I’ve accumulated a lot of samples and books and equipment. Right now, most of that ‘stuff’ is precariously balanced on a wooden storage container in the same spare room. Finding specific items is becoming increasingly challenging.
I recently started making polymer clay earrings and this has brought with it more boxes of tools and equipment that I need storage for. That too is piled precariously in the spare bedroom.
Please don’t think this is a complaint. I know we’re extremely lucky to have a house big enough for us to have separate rooms to work in and there are many people managing in much smaller spaces.
I do most of my writing in the spare bedroom and although I’m staring at a wall, I don’t find it problematic. The ideas flow there and, truthfully, I find I can pretty much write anywhere so long as it’s quiet.
That said, given a choice I would prefer to be next to a window and have a connection to outside. I crave some permanent storage space for my design samples without having to move them regularly when guests stay!
I mentioned that we started to renovate our house back in 2018. We renovated all of it except for the top floor. The house is an Edwardian semi-detached property, built in 1909. It was originally built with three floors; the second (or third if you’re in the US) contains a walk-in loft space, a small-ish room and what can only be described as a cupboard containing a mustard-yellow toilet and small basin. If we had the money and/or the need for another large bedroom, the walk-in loft space is ripe for converting but we would then have nowhere to store ‘stuff’, so that will not be happening any time soon!
What we have decided to do is renovate the small-ish room and the yellow WC. This is going to become my office/studio/writing room. We’ve been talking about it for a good while and originally had planned to get a builder in to complete the work, but with the rising costs of everything in the UK we have decided to do what we can ourselves and manage the trades we need rather than paying someone else to do it.
Three weekends ago, we began in earnest and started by clearing the space. We’d been using it as a general dumping ground for a few years and so the first stage was to assess what we wanted to keep, what could be given to the charity shop and what needed to be disposed of.
Once cleared, we got a much better sense of the space and how it could work. We could also see the extent of the wonkiness of this old house and some of the potential issues.
“It’s on the piss” one eloquent tradesman told me, referring to the walls.
This was made even clearer to us when we stripped all of the wallpaper from the walls and pulled up the ancient carpet and lino.
Despite the mess, I love this process of stripping a house back to its bones and revealing the layers of history buried beneath it. There was newspaper under the lino dating from 1965 and I found a Saint Christopher pendant beneath some carpet.
In the background to all of this I have, of course, been designing the space. I’ve chosen colours and have a spreadsheet for all the fittings we will need for the room and the adjoining bathroom. I’m trying to get the best prices and deals for each item as we are doing this on as tight a budget as we can.
The challenges and serious expenses of renovating come in hiring tradespeople.
Finding good, reliable tradespeople in the UK can be difficult. It’s a highly unregulated market and we’ve had very mixed experiences over the past few years.
Right now, we’re on the hunt for a plumber and a plasterer. There’s only a small amount of work for each trade and that makes it even more difficult to find the right people because, in London at least, there is often a minimum fee for a job.
My husband and I have done a lot of renovating over the past decade or so and we know what our skills and our limitations are. We know that we can do the painting ourselves. I LOVE painting and will relish that job when we finally get things to that point. It’s so satisfying seeing those finishing layers of colour go on and the room finally coming back to life.
Plumbing and plastering is trickier and not something we will do ourselves. Back in 2013, my husband changed some taps in our then bathroom. A quick job, we thought. Or not. After hours hunched underneath the bath and more drips than we started with, we realised that this was a job best left to the professionals.
Last week,
published an interview piece with me where we discussed what the ideal writing environment might look like. It feels fitting that at almost exactly the same time Emma chose to publish that piece, we had just embarked upon the start of my studio/office/writing room renovation.Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to document some aspects of the process of renovation here. I’ll share some of the costs, my ideas, where I’m sourcing items from and the challenges we will undoubtedly face.
How do you feel about DIY or renovation? Have you done any work yourself or do you prefer to get someone in to do it? Can you cope with dust and mess?
Visit my Instagram page Chez Hanny for many more photos of my design projects, including my own home, and you can find out more about the interior design services I offer by visiting www.hannahashe.co.uk
This is so exciting! I have an office but it’s not what I want & while I’ve done some bits my kind keeps going back to the fact that in a year or so we’ll be gutting the place so why put the effort in? But then having a good work environment is so important. Excited to see how this progresses.
Lovely post as per Hannah. May I recommend a book I think you would find really valuable. Slow Productivity by Cal Newport. So good. I interviewed him on the podcast this week - and he speaks to some of the themes in this post.