I have a new office!

This isn’t a change I saw coming. I love my little home office where I work every day.

Except for one really big problem, one that we created ourselves.

After I finished cancer treatment, I was sore everywhere, all the time. So we bought a hot tub!! It helped immensely and I continue to enjoy my daily soak. It is on our back/side porch, and it is covered with a roof to keep the snow off. My office looks into that little hot tub area of the porch. And half the year it is sunny in my office, because we used clear roofing. But as soon as the snow falls and covers that clear roofing material, my office becomes dark, like a cave.

I have tried various lighting, dim to bright, warm to cold shades, but it seems I have sensitive eyes. They get incredibly, painfully dry while working, from the lights, and the computer screens, and I know that I rarely blink when I concentrate on my work on the screen.

So Jeff threw out the idea one day of moving my office to the back little spare room that we turned into a gym. It only has a little window that looks towards the garage so there isn’t much more daylight. But what if we add new windows?

I liked the idea. We could copy the pattern of the double, side by side, windows used in most of the other rooms at the front of the house and add them to the south-facing wall. Then I’d not only have a ton of daylight, I would be able to see outside, especially if I put my desk right against the window. Being able to shift my eye’s focus should also help! I could add curtains or blinds to adjust the sun’s intensity in the summer.

The room is a bit smaller, but that’s fine. And then we could make my old office into a spare room/gym/reading room.

Our contractor Steve, the guy who installed all our windows a couple of years ago, said he could fit us into his schedule! So we ordered the windows and hoped they’d arrive before it got too frigid. (Although Steve was eager to cut a hole in the house at any temperature!)

A few weeks ago, the windows arrived! It only took Steve a week or two to fit us in.

Here is the before photo with his scaffolding set up:

And here is inside:

Jeff ripped up the floor he put it a few months ago. He had used self-levelling concrete and it was a disaster. (It is not nearly as quick and easy as it looks on TV). So why not let our expert carpenter take a try at levelling the floor? Jeff took up the floating click floor so we can reuse it and then hammered up the horrible concrete.

The first issue was discovered when Steve took off the drywall to reframe the wall. The power to the ceiling light is run off the plug under where the window will go, and it needs to move!

Well this is a problem. Electricians are hard to come by in Dawson City. They are always so busy. But thankfully our carpenter’s partner is an electrician! She came right away and made the necessary junction box, which will need to be exposed with a cover thanks to new codes, and she moved the plug over to the left of the wall so we can install a baseboard heater in this room, likely under the new windows (it isn’t heated otherwise, it just gets the heat drifting in from the woodstove and oil heater in the kitchen, but usually stays a bit too chilly). She also gave me a second plug above the height of my desk which is going to be really nice!!

Then Steve built a support wall. Something about not wanting the ceiling to fall on him.

Then he started framing out the windows and building a header for them.

This room is in an addition in the back of the house, so luckily it wasn’t insulated with sawdust like the rest of the house because that would have been messy. And it’s staying pretty warm even after the insulation was removed. The entire house is wrapped with a layer of styrofoam board on the outside, under the siding.

Meanwhile, Jeff’s done a ton of work painting the trim boards, for inside and out, so they’ll all be ready for Steve to install.

While I was in Whitehorse for a check-up, the windows went in!! I almost cried with joy when Jeff sent a photo I saw all the light in the room now!

Look at the light! The windows face the back of the historical telegraph office beside us, and the little historic barn/shed on the next lot that was converted into a small summer cabin.

And it looks directly into Hank’s outdoor kennel he spends the day in during the summer (or it will once the scaffolding is away).

Here’s the outside view:

Next up, the windows were spray foamed. We could have put the same pink insulation in the wall, but it was a few decades old so we went for new stuff.

Then the vapour barrier went up and everything was taped and sealed.

The subfloor under that concrete was a brown fibre board. It had swelled around the edges from a leak before we owned the place. We were worried it was the actual subfloor. Steve had a hunch that they had just used it for an insulation layer and there would be decking underneath, and he was right!! Here is the actual subfloor and the horrible swelled and uneven fibreboard is gone!

Steve put down a new subfloor. And it’s flat! No more levelling needed!

Then the drywall went up!

None of these photos are showing it well, but there is a little closet to the right of the windows, in case you wondered what that wall was.

Then the drywall mudding and taping started!

And the trim went up on the outside! I wonder if anyone will even ever notice this window wasn’t here before. It just looks like it has always been here and matches all the rest!

On the inside, the paint went up next, and the window trim.

And the floor went in!!! It’s so nice now, and level!

Jeff was heading out of town for a few days, so he helped me move my essentials in while the paint was still wet!

Yesterday was my first day working in my new office! I haven’t moved everything over yet, just the essentials for working. I was eager all morning for the sun to rise to see what working in daylight would be like! The sunrise yesterday was 11:26am.

By 10:30am the sky was lighting just a bit and I just saw a raven fly by! I’m going to like this! My monitor blocks most of my view from the bottom part of the windows, but the sky is lovely! Here’s an update once it was light:

While the sun doesn’t rise high enough to be in my eyes at this time of year, it was too bright for a few hours. I’m thinking of the blinds that you can slide up from the bottom, or down from the top, or both, so I can keep the light and just block the harsh part when needed. The closet will probably be converted to shelves. And then I’ll cover the walls with pictures likely, although I really like this minimal clean look.

Steve stopped by one more time with a wooden threshold he made by hand for the doorway that is perfect!

But now here’s the battle. All this stuff in my old office isn’t coming with me to my beautiful new one. Here’s what it looked like after I emptied my bookshelf unit. Time for another purge!

Eventually I’ll get it cleaned out, and then I think we’ll rip out the old carpet and put in the same flooring and just use an area rug. I’m thinking we’ll get some sort of sofa bed. It’s a small room, but it would be nice to use it for reading or watching a movie while Jeff’s watching football in the living room. If we put a guest bed in, it would take up the entire room again and we just don’t have the space, so something more functional, even a futon, is what I’m thinking.