The Farm Office

No, not the back of my SUV where I store grain pails, feed, and my saddle by turns. A real life, climate controlled (sort of) office! All I usually talk about is my outdoor life, but we do spend some time indoors outside of sleeping. In fact, I’ve been home based for work since last summer and I’ve finally moved out of the living room into my own space.

Our house originally had a garage where the den is now, and through the course of events, a sunroom was added after the garage was transitioned and a carport added. The sunroom was really a selling point of the house for me, but we knew it would need a ton of work to be useable.

Let’s start with the bad: the “windows” consisted of five sliding glass doors, of which 4 were screwed shut. The floor was brick patterned linoleum (classic, amiright?). The walls were painted plywood with thinner strips of wood covering the seams. The floor wasn’t insulated. There was a partial wrap around deck that, because the house had no gutters, had caused some water damage to the siding. Train wreck start to finish. The good? It got a new roof when the rest of the house did right after we moved in.

So we moved in, and way back when we had tons of energy, I went ahead and purchased new windows to replace 4 of those sliding glass doors. Beautiful 60×60 picture windows. It is a sunroom, after all. My husband, his friend, and my father-in-law installed them and replaced the siding. Then, we had different colored siding. So of course we painted the house an entirely new color.

But other chores beckoned. Like cleaning up pastures of thousands of gum trees so our animals could eat. So the sunroom sat, in all its new window and brick floor glory, while we got the outside world functional. It was a storage room, and a place to raise baby chicks. But, we are finally done! This spring, we deluded ourselves into thinking we had it together enough to get started. Here is a visual journey, since words would do this no justice.

Around about this point in the project, we had a tornado cut through the property and had many many near misses but are blessed to say all structures survived intact. However, another delay in sunroom finishing was necessary.

We need to finish buying curtains and I’m working on shelving options, but otherwise, the room is complete. We added in wide window ledges and are generally claiming victory on the crown molding.