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HOME OFFICE PERK-UPS

I've had a home office for years. It once lived upstairs in a large, converted attic that was easily shut off from the living quarters of the house. I just set it up as an office. It looked like an office, ran like an office, had room for everything-and I thought I liked it that way.

Last year I had two major surgeries that made stairs impossible for several months. Before the operations, a friend helped me move essentials down to a much smaller room that, sadly, I have to share with a sofa bed for guests.

Shutting the wide double doors between the office and the living room is not difficult, but it makes my office area dark and the living room seem too small. Yep. I had to think decoration. Which could have been more difficult if I hadn't had this former guest bedroom already set up as Southwest to match my living room theme. Unlike my daintier main bedroom dcor, Native American art matches anything!

I had to move some standing pots and other floor pieces in order to fit ino my smaller, suddenly crowded area well. My big computer surround desk stayed upstairs, along with one computer and a spare desk for an old one. Two computers moved down with me, along with my resurrected small computer desk (bought when I had a tiny Mac SE, and even the dot-matrix printer fit on the same small unit.)

My main computer is next to the wall under the one small shelf of this desk that gets piled high with wire office baskets. Luckily, this area is in the one corner that can't be seen from the living room even when both doors are open.

The other, smaller computer fits nicely on the fair-sized bedroom desk that was in the room-and has old-fashione, but adequate drawer space. Somehow, luckily, the colors of the desks "almost" match. A fairly large matching wood microwave stand with both an open shelf and two deep closed-door shelves is now my laser printer stand and most-needed supply cabinet. Most of "just treasured" books from the two bookcases in the room have been repaced with reference books.

The former wooden nightstand with a tiny bit of closed storage space now holds more supplies although I try to keep some color on top with one distinctive Native American doll. Since my sofa bed has matching ends, I moved the pillows to the other end for sleeping and the reading lamp to the low bookcase at that end.

More Native American art and a couple of favorite non-topic paintings hang on walls and perch on decorative wall shelves around the room. Both bookcase tops

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