Office Remodel

The living room, with its useless fireplace and haunted carpet, held the most potential. It was time for a massive redesign, a plan to tear down the old and build a new reality custom-fit to our life.

The Walnut & The Acropolis: Building a Place for Work and Memory

Every house comes with ghosts. Ours was a cat. The previous owners had left behind a spectral feline presence in the form of pee stains hidden deep in the carpet. It was an odor that would emerge on humid days, a faint but stubborn reminder that we were living in a space that hadn’t quite become our own. That carpet, coupled with a bizarre, glassless gas fireplace squatting in the corner, defined our living room: a space with a past we didn’t choose and a layout that didn’t serve our present. Change wasn’t just an option; it was a necessity.

The catalyst came when my son, Lincoln, officially kicked me out of my office. The room was converted into his nursery, and suddenly I was a professional nomad in my own home. I’ve been working remotely since 2014 — long before it was the mandated norm — so my workspace isn’t a luxury; it’s the bedrock of my craft. I needed a new base of operations. The living room, with its useless fireplace and haunted carpet, held the most potential. It was time for a massive redesign, a plan to tear down the old and build a new reality custom-fit to our life. The idea was to create a wall of built-in shelving — a dedicated home for books, cameras, tech, and the tangible artifacts of our memories.

A home shouldn’t be a rigid container you squeeze your life into; it should be a living thing that grows and changes with you.

The first step in any meaningful project is the plan. I turned to Google Sketchup, mapping out the dimensions and iterating on the design until it felt right. The foundation would be a series of custom, flat-pack cabinets from The Cabinet Authority, a choice that blended quality with a hands-on approach. But the soul of the project, the surface where all the work and creativity would happen, had to be special. I envisioned a massive, 17-foot stretch of walnut butcher block, a continuous plane of dark, rich wood spanning the entire wall. I found my supplier, of all places, on Etsy. He was a woodworker based in Port Townsend, a short ferry ride across the Puget Sound.

This is where a simple project becomes an adventure. A friend and I made a day of it, driving onto the ferry and watching the gray-green water of the Sound churn below. We met the craftsman at his shop, a sanctuary of sawdust and steel tucked away in the woods. He showed us the slabs of walnut, and there was a profound satisfaction in seeing the raw material, in shaking the hand of the person who shaped it. We loaded the heavy, beautiful timber into the truck, had a celebratory lunch at The Pourhouse on the waterfront, and barely made one of the last ferries of the day, racing the setting sun back home. The desktop wasn’t just a product anymore; it was a story.

Back home, the real work began. Demolition is a uniquely gratifying form of creation. Ripping out the old fireplace felt like an exorcism. That 700-pound metal box, followed by 600 pounds of foul carpet — weights confirmed by a grimly satisfying trip to the dump — was the physical act of erasing the past. With the room stripped to the subfloor, I could begin to build anew. I sealed the phantom cat stains with Kilz primer, laid down a sound-dampening underlayment, and clicked together planks of “honey comb” vinyl flooring.

The assembly was a methodical process, a game of precision and patience. The flat-pack cabinets came together smoothly, and I spent hours ensuring they were perfectly level, the necessary foundation for everything to come. Then came the walnut. I stained it with my own mixture — a “dark half” of pure tung oil and an orange-based drying agent that brought out the wood’s deepest character. Several coats of polyurethane followed, with a final wipe-on layer to create a perfectly smooth, durable surface. For the upper shelves, I used simple pine boards, finishing the structure with crown molding for a clean, built-in look. The paint, a Sherwin Williams gallery color called Shamrock Green, was a bold choice, but it felt right —energetic and alive. I even designed and built a small, ventilated platform for my custom gaming PC, giving my digital world its own physical home.

A project of this scale costs about $8,000 when you do it yourself — a figure that includes a small arsenal of Ryobi tools I’ll have for years to come. A contractor would have likely charged upwards of $20,000. But the real value isn’t in the money saved. It’s in the skills learned, the problems solved, and the intimate connection you forge with the space you inhabit.

Today, the wall is the centerpiece of our home. It’s a library, an office, a tech station, and a gallery. And on it hangs a photograph that anchors the entire space. It’s a shot I took from the Acropolis in Athens when Kelli and I were on our belated honeymoon in 2021. We’d gotten married during the pandemic and never had a proper trip, so this was our chance to finally escape. The image is a high-dynamic-range panorama, stitched together from nine separate photos, capturing a sweeping view of the city. In the distance, you can see the ruins of the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Panathenaic Stadium, where the first modern Olympic games were held.

I’m endlessly fascinated by the story of that temple. It took nearly 700 years for the Greeks to build it, an incredible multi-generational feat of engineering and artistry. When the Persians sacked Athens, they destroyed much of it in a single day. The photograph, for me, is a meditation on permanence and impermanence, on the things we build and the stories that outlast them. Printed on metal, it has a unique depth, and the small sconce I installed above it illuminates the clouds, giving the sky an ethereal glow. It’s a window to another time, both for an ancient civilization and for us.

That wall is now a physical representation of our life. It holds the tools of my trade, the books we love, the cameras that capture our story, and the memories that define it. The walnut desktop, born from a forest in Port Townsend and hauled home on a ferry, is no longer just a piece of wood. It’s a testament to the idea that with a clear vision and a little bit of work, you can transform the space around you.

The best rooms aren’t just designed to be looked at; they are built to be lived in, holding our past, our present, and the potential for our future.