How to decorate your office step by step, WIP edition

Twelvewenty-five easy step for maximum success! Let’s get to it right away.

1. Have a perfect image in you head of how you want the space to turn out. Don’t leave out even the tiniest detail. This step includes imagining beautiful glass desks, white picture frames, white couches, white rugs, transparent plastic designer chairs, white lamps, and the like. Don’t set a budget nor calculate a rough estimate as to how much it’ll cost.
2. Do some research and window shopping online and realize no one sells glass desks. Abandon the idea and decide on a white desk.
3. Find the perfect white desk in a furniture store. Notice it’s on sale. Decide to wait until you have the office keys before you buy the desk.
4. Get the office keys and immediately go to the store selling the white desk. Notice it’s price has tripled. Leave the desk and go to Ikea to cheer yourself up.
5. Having pondered it over for about five seconds, buy an enormous rug and seven Lack TV benches from Ikea.
6. Spend the next day assembling the seven Lack benches on the office floor. (Author’s note: you may need a large cup of coffee to go with this.)
7. Realize you need at least one more enormous rug to cover the hideous office floor and at least three more Lack benches to construct a sofa.
8. Go to Ikea, buy another enormous rug and five more Lack benches.
9. Since the white desk is gone, wash the old glass and black steel side table that has been on the balcony for years as a flower table, and drag it to the office. You know, until you find a better desk.
10. Come Monday, take your laptop and other work stuff with you to the office and notice the flower table starts vibrating violently every time you attempt to write on your keyboard. Go to Ikea to find a better desk.
11. Decide all the regular desks in Ikea are hideous and see if you could pair up Ikea desk legs with Ikea desktops to construct the ideal desk. See the most gorgeous black wooden legs. Find out they need a desktop that’s too wide for the width of your office space. Take the next best thing, ugly gray steel legs, and a white desktop with an adequately narrow width.
12. Since the Lacks are black, and you’re already in Ikea, pick up two large black picture frames in the trolley as you pass the picture frame section. Pick up also five large pillows you’ll need for the Lack sofa thing you’ve been assembling. And mattresses.
13. Head for the cashiers. Just when you’re about to place yourself at the end of the que, hear an announcement declaring credit cards aren’t working at the moment. Produce a wallet from your pocket, realize it has no cash in it, run outside to the only ATM, see the endless que for it, go back inside, decide it’s not worth it, and go home empty handed.
14. Go to Ikea the following day. Decide the credit card malfunctioning was pure fate and now you must do things differently, so you take the gorgeous legs instead of the hideous gray ones and go for picture frames made of unprocessed birch that you can wax to match the darker wood shade of your office lunch bowl. (It’s the little things that make the world.
15. Since no local fabric shop sells the right colour of upholstering fabric for the sofa (it simply has to be the exact same green as the teamug you bought specially for the office), drive to the next town to a large fabric store and find the perfect shade. Buy some.
16. When stepping out of the fabric shop, see a large hardware store across the street and go in to get wooden planks for desktops. Find two perfect pine slabs with an optimal width that together will make a beautiful desk. Find no paint for them in the store, though. Instead, find a wood wax you can use to change the color of the picture frames to match the lunch bowl. While staring at the price of the tiniest can of wax you could find, realize the budget you thought to be inexistent is alive and well after all. (Buy the wax anyway.)
17. Go to the office, assemble the Ikea desk legs - the task will require the simultaneous use of two hands and two feet - and wax the picture frames. Realize no amount of water or soap will extract the leftover wax from the brush. Sand and paint one side of one of the pine slabs with acrylic paint you brought from home. Run out of paint.
18. Bring the sewing machine you bought six months earlier and haven’t used yet to the office. Take it out of the box and prepare the threads. Neglect the instructions (all sewing machines work the same way, right?) and within two minutes, break the bobbin case. Spend next hour figuring out how to fix it. (This includes finding a missing piece inside the outer casing and putting it back to its place.)
19. Having fixed the machine, lay out the fabric for the sofa and pillows and cut it into pieces. Realize you bought too little fabric. Prick your hands with pins multiple times while processing the fabric. (An experienced sewer will have either got used to this long ago or found a way to avoid it.) When done, find out you have made a hole in your pants at some point. Fix the pants.
20. Buy more paint and finish the pine slabs. Construct the desk. Realize the slab isn’t stable and add little plastic thingies (those preventing door knobs from damaging walls) of different heights under it.
21. Use your creative abilities to mix a green color that first seems to match the green of everything else in the office (but after drying it doesn’t) and paint two mysterious and artsy pictures for the waxed picture frames. Assemble the picture frames, place the paintings inside, install the back panel, lift the thing up and see the paintings fall out of place. Open the frames up again, tape the paintings into place, reconstruct, and see them hold. Hang the frames on the wall at a specific height (the same height for both, the same!).
22. Put the sewing machine away and deconstruct the wobbly flower table with a screwdriver so it’s easier to dispose. Realize someone might want it. Call someone and ask. Reconstruct the wobbly flower table.
23. Go to Ikea and buy a pillowcase for the one pillow of the sofa there wasn’t enough fabric for.
24. Wrap a gigantic piece of art you had at home in sackcloth and transfer it (don’t as how) to the office to hide a wall illogicality. Remember to remove the sackcloth once at the office.
25. Sit down on the sofa, look around, and realize none of the original perfect image is present at the finished place.

Happy decorating!

RK

P.S.
26. Go to the furniture store selling the initial white desk and see that it's on sale again.