One Piece at a Time

Things have been crazy busy lately.

In the past few weeks I worked until three in the morning for work, spent the next day feeling like a zombie, dealt with a fallen tree in the backyard, and somehow found myself patching walls, running cable through drywall, and painting instead of relaxing. It felt like every day ended later than the one before.

Out of everything that happened, though, one project stood out.

Over the past few months, I’ve written quite a bit about my office. It’s where I work, where I write, and where most of my little hobby projects seem to end up. The Atari shelf, the growing cartridge collection, comic books, LEGO builds, old game consoles… little by little it’s become a room that feels unmistakably like mine.

The funny thing is, none of that happened overnight.

Some of it happened because I had an idea. A lot of it happened because Sherri encouraged those ideas. She was the one who suggested recreating the Atari print with real cartridges. She’s spent countless weekends wandering flea markets with me looking for games that most people haven’t thought about in forty years. She gave me the LEGO Soundwave set for my birthday because she knew exactly how much I’d enjoy building it.

Looking around my office now, it’s easy to forget that every shelf, every picture, and every little project was added one piece at a time. Some ideas were mine. Some were hers. Most of them involved the two of us making little trips to flea markets, hardware stores, or comic shops, slowly turning an ordinary room into a place I genuinely enjoy spending time in.

It finally hit me that she deserves the same thing.

We both work from home, and we both spend a huge part of our lives in our offices. If I’m lucky enough to have a room that feels like my space, why shouldn’t she have one that feels like hers?

The answer, of course, wasn’t to make her office look like mine. That would be a disaster.

Sherri isn’t a collector. She doesn’t need shelves full of Atari cartridges or Transformers. Her idea of a comfortable workspace is completely different from mine, and that’s exactly how it should be. The goal wasn’t to build another version of my office.

The goal was to build her office.

So last weekend we patched old wallpaper, sanded walls, ran cable through the wall, and gave the room a completely new look with soft pink walls, a rich chocolate brown accent wall, and even a matching ceiling. By the end of the weekend, we were moving the furniture back into place and, for the first time, we could start to see the room taking shape.

We’re not quite finished yet.There are still things to organize, decorations to hang, and little touches she’ll add over time. Once everything is back in place, she’ll be able to live in the room for a while and decide what feels right. I have a feeling it will evolve the same way mine has… one small change at a time.

Maybe that’s the point.

The rooms we spend the most time in probably shouldn’t be finished all at once. They should grow with us, collecting little pieces of our lives along the way.

My office tells the story of retro games, comics, old technology, and hobbies that have followed me since I was a kid.

Hers will tell a completely different story.

And I can’t wait to watch it come together.

The funny thing is, my office still isn’t finished either. It probably never will be. I’ll keep moving things around, finding another Atari cartridge, or discovering some little project that somehow finds a place on a shelf.

But this process reminded me that my favorite project wasn’t in my office at all.

It was helping build hers.