DH and I both work from home about 25% of the time so we know intimately the challenges of home offices. :) Let me ask - the guest room behind the pocket door - do you ever use it as such, or is it just staged that way? If you don't use it as such, I would turn that space into the office proper, and use the landing area for a sitting room. Here are your wishes, and what I would do: -- a desk to work at, with a comfortable desk chair You can combine this and the third item with a desk that incorporates a filing cabinet drawer like . Alternately, you can repurpose a large filing cabinet as a printer stand and/or pictures, like . -- space for a printer As mentioned above - can go on either a desk or filing cabinet. I would not suggest the desk. They do take a good chunk of space, and most printers create a lot of side-to-side sway as they print (especially if you do a lot of color/art printing, which I do) which can make it hard to use the desk for other things at the same time. -- storage for a large amount of household papers -- financial, medical, etc. See previous for integrated or separate file cabinet. -- storage for office supplies (paper, pens, stapler, tape, etc) Easily held in desk drawer(s), or a repurposed portion of a file cabinet. -- a comfy chair for reading, or for someone else to sit in while I am at the desk If you can use the guest room for this, easy-peasy. If not, I would place a comfortable chair under the window and use it as such. I would not want my computer monitor directly in front of a window. Aesthetically, I hate blocking windows. Functionally, it will be VERY hard on your eyes to read a monitor with bright light and/or distraction immediately behind you. -- display for pictures of family and friends This can go anywhere, on the wall if nothing else.

OK. I admit it. I am a secret wannabe moveaholic. I am an Air Force brat who moved every two years while growing up and came to love it. I crave change just for the sake of it. New views, fresh perspectives, wide-open opportunities. Alas. I am married to (and in love with) a content-where-he-hangs-his-hat man. So... I paint rooms, make drapes, work on many projects at once, refinish furniture, create oil paintings. But, I do not feel totally satisfied with where we live. I want to move. The house we are living in is 10 feet away from our neighbor's house---we live in a historic district in a small, Southern city. I CRAVE a view and a lot more privacy. So, yes, cricket0828, I think it is fine to move if you are bored, if you can afford the move and your DH is in agreement. paint chips, you came very close to how I feel when you said, "Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that sometimes you just have to let life pull you along for a ride."

Great point made my beth4. I was watching a video of myself made 20 years ago in our first house. The kitchen was functional but ugly, the family room dark and old fashioned, even for that time. But you know, it was our first home and we were in love with it. We knew we would need to make updates, but we also were fine with living in the house the way it was, for as long as we needed to save, in order to make updates. And we aren't talking about MAJOR work. Over the next 8 years we stripped wallpaper, changed our flooring, painted and repaired and added on to a deck. Granted we did remodel the kitchen right before we sold, but it was an inexpensive remodel that hardly made a dent in our finances. My teenaged daughter (who was born after we sold the house) was horrified as she watched the video with me and could not believe I would be willing to live in such an "old" looking house. My, how things have changed. Yes, a lot of this has to do with the remodeling industry. But I also think that we were in a different place (before the most recent crash) economically as a country, than we were 20-25 years ago. We had about two decades of prosperity, incredibly escalating real estate values and the mindset that things would continue this way. In 1994, when we sold that old house we made a puny $35,000 profit on the sale ( after owning it for 8 years). In the following two years, our new home increased in value over $100,000! With such a rapid escalation, it no longer seemed a stretch to start pouring money into our homes and making them our own "mini-castles." After all, we knew we would get every penny back and even more. Why not remodel and enjoy the results AND make a profit? It was a no brainer. That no longer is the case. However, we still haven't been able to give up the mindset of the booming past. The younger generation grew up in perfectly updated surroundings and they are the ones now looking to purchase their first homes. They aren't willing to compromise because of the way they grew up. They don't know anything different. So we have created our own monster. I think we have entered a period of time in home ownership where there are no set answers and uncertainty overwhelms us all. Of course you do not spend money on a house if you don't have the money to spend. That is what got us into this mess in the first place. Today, I am 5 years away from paying off my mortgage and still have many, many years before I hit retirement age. My house is still worth a considerable amount more today than when I purchased it. I do not feel guilty about spending money to remodel that home. But then again, I can AFFORD to remodel. If we live within our means, the quality of our lives becomes inmeasurably improved. Hopefully, we can instill that idea into younger generatation. Jeez, what a rambling message this has been. Sorry.

The furniture and walls blend together to make the room feel larger than it is. It would look very different if that were, for instance, cherry or mahogany against off-white walls. I once also had a tiny square office, with a corner cut out for a closet. My husband had the wall to the right of the door, me to the left. My 4+' desk filled the little wall between the closet and the window, with printer, computer tower, and all office supplies tidily on shelves in the closet. I don't normally like to face a wall, but the outside was right there with a little glance to the right. An orange tree with honeysuckle growing through it was just outside, so close that (without screens) I could have reached out and touched the butterflies and hummers flitting around several months a year. Both were lessons I took from that little rental of things that really worked nice for me. Even including facing a wall in the right conditions. Here farther north, it's a bird bath under a small three the birds take their turns from.