A Room of My Own - Sort of by Nancy L. Eady

This week, something exciting begins. My husband, who loves to woodwork, is starting to build me a desk where I can work from home and write with a two monitor set up without taking over the dining room table.

Last year, I learned I had Covid on a Saturday morning when I had a major brief due the next Friday. The first stop after Urgent Care was my office, where I picked up my work computer and my two monitors so I could work from home. I ended up working from the following setup for the whole week:

 While it looks like a pleasant, if crowded, place to work, doing it for a week revealed problems. First, the table that the monitors and computer rest upon is our dining room table. Leaving them up full time keeps us from using the table as a place to eat. (Let’s pretend just for a minute that we don’t normally eat our meals on trays; even if we use trays, I want the option to use a table.) Second, after about six hours, working at the table was a pain in the neck, literally. To see the monitors, I had to scrunch my chin down to my chest because of their height. After one day, we put the monitors up on an assortment of cookbooks, an uncondensed volume of Shakespeare’s works and a large print King James Bible to ease my neck. Third, the chair bottoms are wood. They are comfortable for the length of a meal up to about four hours; after that, they give me the equivalent of saddle sores. We had a harder time fixing that problem. 

I got the brief filed on time, recovered from Covid, returned my equipment to work and reclaimed my dining room table. There still are times when I need to work from home. Two monitors speed up the process.  Whether I am working on a brief or my creative writing, I can leave a document open on one screen and do research on the other. Mark and I bought two monitors to stay permanently at home in December, and rather than forfeit the dining room table again, we have placed them on the study/library table. 

The chairs are more comfortable, and we now know the number of books needed to raise the monitors to the right height, but the arrangement is cramped. What you can’t see in the picture is that the table and chairs are over 15 years old now, thoroughly scratched, and on their last legs. 

So, Mark has volunteered to build me a desk to replace the library table to give me a place where I can work and write. I’m thrilled. While it’s not exactly a room of my own as a place to work, since I will share it with him, it’s as close as I’m likely to get. 

Of course, my primary creative writing spot will remain, as shown in Shari Randall’s October 2021 post on Writers Who Kill, “Desk Set: Where Writers Who Kill Like to Work,” our sofa. 

But having a more professional work space is exciting too. 

If you could design your own writing room, what would it look like?