office politics

With the basic construction of the floor in it was time to lay an actual floor surface. We had saved a load of tongue and groove floorboards and a load of underlay when we stripped out the middle bedroom, so reused that for the office.

Cutting all the floorboards to the right angles was almost as tricky as doing the ply, but eventually it was all in and ready for testing as a skate ramp.



We also clad the now insulated central wall section with ply

and painted everything in sight.


Once i'd connected the plugs up (including accidentally creating a closed loop of plugs connected to each other but no power source, before i reallised my mistake), cut pieces of wall to size and installed the plugs back in the wall


i could build a desk, which was great as i could make it exactly to my ergonomic specifications, with an extended section to rest my elbow on when using my wacom tablet graphics pad.


With a home made blackout blind made from suitably piratical skull and crossbones material


i had my new, improved, creatively stimulating work station up and running. We also painted the floorboards with black floor paint, for an overall black and white theme.


Then it was time to create Lorna's desk on her side of the room. She went for a smaller angled desk with just room for her computer and scanner

and we built it in the same way as mine, building a frame from 50x50mm battens, making a top out of mdf from the old bedroom walls, then building a surface on top of that from solid wood floorboards (more of those in the next post, when we discuss the corridor floor).

We also made a little shelf, above a section of wall that we'd insulated, out of the same wood.


Then the final thing was to build a bookcase, out of scaffolding planks pulled out of the river and sanded down, to go in front of the central tall section of wall for all our reference books and bits and pieces.