Cindy and I spent all day last Friday cleaning our respective home offices, but there was one tiny little difference in the final outcome; I was cleaning mine out for good.

It’s akin to Superman closing down his Fortress of Solitude or Batman giving up his Batcave.

But truth be told I had not been spending a lot of time there over the past 2 years. One of the reasons I bought my first laptop was to be able to do my research in the living room in the company of my wife (though I still do my writing, most of it, in solitary), so that brought down the amount of time I spent in there. In addition, my traveling has kept me out of there and over the past several months it had become more of a place to throw any boxes I shipped home to await my arrival and unpacking.

The major reason though is that we are still optimistically hoping to follow through on our plan to build a cabin on our property in the mountains later this year and sell this place, despite the crappy economy. Though we are dramatically reducing our amount of “stuff”, we will still need a room to store some things while we do some remodeling, repainting and re-flooring and since Cindy still uses her office quite a bit…well I drew the short straw. Plus, have you priced storage units lately? For a room the size of my office we’d have to make another monthly mortgage payment!

So the only things from my office that will remain in that room for now will be my two bookshelves, a rolltop desk for my laptop and a credenza for the scanner and printer, all pushed into one corner of the room but still useable when needed. The rest of the room is already filling up with tubs, boxes and crates, even as I continue to clean out more “stuff” from the office that we have been giving to family, friends and the trash collector, or donating to Goodwill and the library.

So while I AM a little sad, it’s not really THAT big of a deal. Plus, when the cabin is built, I’ll have an office that looks out over our creek and the mountain. Not a bad trade.