The Writing Cave

For several months, I juggled writing up at Starbucks and writing at home. My office was under construction and I was forced to give up the perfect spot where most of my creativity evolved from. I was crushed – sort of. See, I love coffee and spending a little extra time marketing, networking, and writing up at my favorite coffee shop, wasn’t so awful. Dealing with the disaster that was my office – well, that was.

The first part of the project was destroying my office completely, stripping out all of the furniture, wall fixtures – everything. Then came the building of the shelves. Wall to wall bookshelves that is. An unforeseen delay occurred which set up back three months. (The carpenter never received the measurements and had been waiting on us.) Finally, he reached out to ask when we’d planned to get those to him. My husband swears that he emailed them off, but that hadn’t happened. **Shrugs** Now we are finally having the shelves built and then … the carpenter has to have shoulder surgery, which I knew about and would’ve been fine with had we not had the several month delay. **Shrugs Again** But after more than seven months, I finally had my shelves built and ready to install. All that was left was staining them to match my desk and cabinets.

Now here is where my head hit the desk … the weather in Texas is unpredictable and in a state where a drought has been terrible, we started to get rain and then the temperature began to drop. Ideally stain should dry at a constant 70 degrees … that wasn’t happening. **Shrugs Again**

At this point, we are closing in on the year mark and my bookshelves are only half stained. As I mentioned, Texas weather is unpredictable. We received a warm snap over the winter and I was able to get the rest of the shelves stained. With a sigh of relief, I watched as the cabinets were installed, my heart exploding to be so close to completing the project.

It wasn’t overnight, but it was completed within a month. The shelves are constructed of three towers with eight shelves each. **That’s a lot of stain** And most of my books fit. I hadn’t realized until I was loading my shelves back up just how many books I had.

So, after one full year of renovations to my office/house, I’m finally working in the space that I craved the most. I still have a love affair with coffee, but now I simply brew it at home and let the aroma waft through the house. ;-)