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Curious about where your favorite blogger works? Send us your ideas for Behind the Blog and we'll hunt them down for you, and beg them to share.

Dude, it's Chuck. If you are even the slightest bit Internet savvy, then you don't need any further explanation. For this installment of Behind the Blog, we asked Heather Armstrong, aka Dooce, to give us a sneak peek inside her workspace. And we thought, who better to show us how a home office should work, than the queen of the blogosphere, herself?

Click through to see what she has to say about her newly renovated home office.

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Right around the time we moved into this house, Kelly LaPlante, an interior designer who specializes in organic, green design, asked us if she could design a room in our house and have the photos of it used in a book to promote organic design. She chose to do the office, and we changed very little of her original design. The turquoise color on the south wall is "Water #07" from a company called Yolo, and it is completely eco-friendly. All the photos on the walls are pictures my husband and I have taken, and Kelly and her assistant, Sarah, were the ones who hung them all wonky like that. At first I was all, you have got to be kidding, there is no way I can work in an office where a wall of frames THAT DON'T LINE UP is just staring at me like that, and my lip twitched for several days after they left. And I was going to change it, was going to hang them in perfectly symmetrical rows because I have issues, deep, frightening issues, but the arrangement really grew on me, and now I love it. It's like Kelly and Sarah came into my life and forced some disorder into it. So it turns out Kelly is not just an interior designer, she is also a therapist.

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What's always found on your workspace?

My iPhone, a post-it-note that has the phone number on it because I can never remember it (blame the weed, it's always the weed), about four or five memory cards for my Canon 5D, and my SanDisk card reader. In fact, that card reader goes everywhere with me, that and the battery charger for the camera. I have a recurring nightmare that I've traveled to some exotic locale, and when I get off the plane I realize I haven't packed the card reader or the battery charger, so I can only take as many photos as one card will hold. And then I throw up. Isn't that sad?

Favorite thing about your workspace?

The size. I share this workspace with my very tall, lumbering husband, and he has this mysterious disease that causes a cloud of cables and random phone chargers to hover around him at all times. But the office is big enough that only occasionally does one of those cables wander over and wrap itself around my ankle.


What do you hate about your workspace?

This is complicated because what I hate about it is also what I love about it most. The window right next to my desk faces south, so we get a lot of bright light in the room, and I thrive on that light. In the summer it's not a problem, because the sun is high enough in the sky that it doesn't shine directly into the room. But now that the seasons are changing and the sun is moving lower on the horizon, it shines right into my face. And it's so obnoxiously bright that I am blinded the entire time I'm working. I haven't had the time to make a decision about whether to get blinds or a curtain or whatever (window treatments have always been the hardest part for me about designing a space), so we've put up tin foil as a temporary fix, which you cannot see in the pictures because I don't want you to think I'm the type of person who would put tin foil in her windows. So let's just pretend this last paragraph never even happened.

Resources?

I work on a Mac G5 when I'm in the office, on a black MacBook when I'm in bed. Our desks are from a local place called Form + Function, and we sit in Herman Miller Aeron chairs that we ordered from a local place called Manhattan Loft. The white storage units next to the desks are from Ikea, and the striped carpet tiles are from Flor.

Hand-crafted elephants are from Tiny Warbler, and the wood type prints and coasters are from Green Chair Press. And yes, that is my diploma from BYU in that one picture. Shut up.

Thanks for letting us peek, Dooce!

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  • Behind the Blog: Better Living Through Design

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