When we left Colorado, I got rid of all my office furniture—which turned out to be a blessing—because we expected to move into a small three bedroom apartment in Germany.  We were lucky and received a four-bedroom apartment, so I turned the fourth bedroom—a small, dark room—into my office space and guest room.

For the past year, I made do with an old dining table set on bed risers for my huge printer and PC Tower, two cheap pressboard shelves that I put under the table, a flimsy metal and glass computer desk for the monitor and keyboard, and a DVD tower that I used as a bookcase.  The closet is full of boxes and Hubby’s Army gear.  The room is so dark, that I get terrible headaches while I’m studying.  It drove me NUTS!

I need organization. If you’ve seen this post or this one, you know just how organized I like to be.  Without an organized space to work in, I feel anxious and can’t focus. Now that I am feeling much better, I decided that it was time to fix my office–where I spend s most of my time.  You can also see my obsession with Ikea in this post and this one.

I have been planning this room for the past four months.  After weeks of looking at Ikea’s website and working out a reasonable budget, I came up with this design.

Once we received our tax refund, it was time to plan my shopping trip to Ikea.  I put everything that I wanted on my office wish list and printed it out to take with us.  Ikea’s lists are great!  You can check the available stock at your local store, and when you print it out, it gives you the exact location of the furniture items.  With list in hand, we headed to Ikea in Regensburg on Saturday.

This was our haul.  That large black bin in the cart was full of stuff, and there is a bulging ikea bag attached to the cart behind all of those yellow boxes.

We had enough room in the van to go back in the store and get my Ektorp sofas for the living room (next weekend’s shopping trip), but Hubby was not thrilled about going back inside.

We got home a little later than we wanted and still had to make dinner, so we got a very late start on putting the furniture together. The ALEX drawers were not difficult to assemble, but they were time-consuming.  Here’s a photolog of how our night went.

Aaaand that’s where we stopped. It was midnight and we were exhausted.

I did a little more throughout the day, but I also had a lot of studying and writing to do for school. Here’s how my day went.

I bought the wrong light bulbs for my ARSTID wall lamps, so I had to bring in a spare table lamp.  I also bought the wrong LINNMON desktop, so I will have to remedy that next weekend when we go shopping for the living room.  Still to do: BILLY Bookcases and organizing. It’s going to be a long week.

Do you have any Ikea rooms to share?