apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

I recently had roommates move in and they owned a huge fancy design table. I'm a designer and so is one of my roomies (duh) so we set her table up and moved my smaller pretty mission style desk to the dining room to become a bar/buffet. it works quite well. :)

I applaud the effort to use desks in alternative ways, but I guess my biggest fear is that once you start calling something in your home a "desk" it is doomed to be covered with stacks of paper and become a landing strip for a tape dispenser, a stapler and piles of unpaid bills. While such a "desk" is fine in an office (be it in a company HQ or in a room of your home, if you are lucky enough to have a whole separate room for a home office), I would hate to have such a "desk" in open view in my apartment. My whole M.O. is to hide the fact that my dining table converts into a desk when necessary.

A beautiful mod desk sitting in your entryway and displaying one little blotter pad, or a delicate box of stationery is pretty. Wait a week and it'll be covered in stuff, at least in my house. Not only is it a horizontal surface (thus already endangered)-- it's called a "desk"-- now that's just asking for trouble.

Me, I have a sideboard parallel to my dining table containing all my desk accessories, binders and files. I can open the sideboard when I need to do desk-y things. My computer is a laptop with a wireless card that can be put to service anywhere-- including the dining table. The hardest part was dealing with the printer. But a-ha-- another sideboard hides it, and airport express means there is no umbilical cord attaching the computer and the printer.

So while I do love a pretty desk-- no desk for me until it can have a room of its own.

The console/sofa table as desk (or desk as console/sofa table) is one of my all-time favorite ways to maximize space in (and the furnishings of) a spatially-challenged home or room.

I'm sitting at (and in) the very same thing as I type.

Hmmm... this furthering my thoughts on tossing the ghetto $20 Wal-Mart "workspace" "desk" I have (the kind of desk that can only be used as a desk) and replacing it with a simpler, more streamlined desk.

I really like the idea of using a a sofa table as a desk alternative. I'm in the process of moving to a 1-bedroom apartment instead of a 2-bedroom (goodbye home office!), and I think this might be a great solution.

I also love the idea of the sofa table as a desk too but what do you do if you have a PC instead of a laptop? I have to put the PC on my desk but have decided that I don't want my desk in my bedroom and must find a way to incorporate it into my very small living room..thoughts?

Sparkle-- tossing the ghetto workspace desk from Wal-Mart gets totally away from the whole idea of 'reusing' and 'repurposing'... could you paint it? Alter it in some way? Do something to reuse rather than trash it?

I'm planning to use Pier 1's puzzle desk as a changing table in my son's modern nursery, then later on down the road he can use it as an actual desk.