Architecting happiness
Working on home improvement projects
Programmer’s log. Epoch time 1710128177. Happy daylight savings day! I use “happy” sarcastically. Spring daylight savings is always the hardest—losing an hour makes me panicked every year. Even though I knew it was happening, even though I had nothing serious planned today, I still felt rushed by the clock. Waking up at 9am feels so different psychologically compared to 8am. Maybe this will finally be the last time we have to live this way in California…
Happy Sunday!
Another double feature for you today. I was originally intending to break down our recent home office update. However, as I began to write, I also started to think about how our surroundings and living spaces shape our experience of life. Soon, I found the writing ballooned into two separate but related posts on the process of home transfiguration.
As the Oxford English dictionary defines it,
trans·fig·u·ra·tion (noun)
a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state.
I hope you enjoy reading about the design and organization of our house. It has been delightful to look back over the last two years and see the sheer magnitude of the change. Each individual decision didn’t feel like it added much, but taken together it transforms into something quite lovely and uniquely suited to us.
Architecting happiness
Working on home improvement projects
We moved to our current house in Oakland in November 2021 and over the last few years here, I’ve been slowly transfiguring each space in the house to better fit our needs and whims.
The first year was just focused on outfitting the place with basic furniture. We arrived to the house with barely anything, no dining table or chairs or couch or rugs. Sitting there the first day in camp chairs on the bare wood floor, we looked like squatters in our own house.
Dru and I had come back from a year living abroad in Japan in September 2019 and moved straight into a shared home with friends that already came partially furnished. We had brought very few things with us to Japan in the first place since international shipping was so expensive. And the basic everyday necessities we did collect over the year abroad, we eventually donated or sold in a second round when we moved back. The only furniture piece I made painful effort to keep was a beautiful Muji kotatsu table, unavailable anywhere outside of Japan. The table was carefully wrapped in layers of blankets and bubble wrap before being packed into a shipping container to be sent overseas back to America.
…
(Click here to read more)
The office
Designing the house machine for working
Our home office is the most used room in the house. My husband and I have been working from home since the pandemic shutdown so we are in this room at least 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. We also use the office as a maker space during evenings and weekends for our creative hobbies.
For a long time, the office situation was extremely haphazard. I started off with the crappiest workspace imaginable. This was back when we were living with friends—I thought the shutdown would only last two weeks and therefore I didn’t put much effort into my (supposedly temporary) remote setup. I didn’t even have a work desk at home, so I just posted up on the shared dining room table with a monitor and keyboard. After a few days, it became very obvious that this was an inconvenient and unsustainable setup for everyone involved.
The next iteration of my workspace was slightly better. I acquired an actual desk and chair. I bought appropriate remote working gear like a high quality webcam and a soft key light. I moved my desk to a quiet corner of the house so I could focus without distractions. And once we moved to our own house, we now had an office with an actual door. This was so critical in a world where one person might have nonstop video calls from 9 to 5. They could be banished to our living room (the “conference room” as we call it), door closing behind them, and the other person could finally work in peace.
But a good desk setup and room with a door wasn’t enough. The overall design and organization of the space is also necessary to get right. As the architect Le Corbusier once said,
A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot-water, cold-water, warmth at will, conservation of food, hygiene, beauty in the sense of good proportion. An armchair is a machine for sitting in and so on.
The machine of our office was still slightly off-kilter. We had good desks and a quiet space, sure. But I still kept procrastinating on improving more of the space. We didn’t have any shelving or storage organization for all of the office stuff, so things were piled everywhere or stuffed into the few drawers we did have. The walls were devoid of decoration. I was reminded of it every time I got on a video call and saw the bare, empty wall behind me. It really did bring down my mood when I saw my surroundings on the screen.
…
(Click here to read more)
📖 Links and books
Here are some great recent reads:
How does this spring compare to normal? (National Phenology Network)
The Ramen Lord (Chicago Magazine)
Anti-aging pill for senior dogs is now in clinical trials (Freethink)
How many hours does it take to make a friend? (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships)
As someone born and raised on the East Coast, growing up under constant threat of tropical thunderstorms and hurricanes and sinkholes, who then moved to the West Coast and has lived through wildfires/earthquakes/bomb cyclones for the last decade, I thought I knew about most extreme weather conditions.
Not even close. Recently, a Midwesterner taught me about derechos.
I’m currently reading Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and listening to How to be Perfect by Mike Schur on audiobook.
I never wish to be easily defined. I'd rather float over other people's minds as something strictly fluid and non-perceivable; more like a transparent, paradoxically iridescent creature rather than an actual person.
— Franz Kafka
That’s all for now! See you later alligator 🐊