Building My Writing Lair: Designs Approved!

Aside from writing, one of my other passions is DIY home renovations. To date, my lovely wife and I have renovated four houses and we’re about 70% down with our current home in North Carolina. She designs, I build, and together we renovate. The current house is a 4400+ sq feet piece of awesome built in 1984. Unfortunately, it was still stuck in the 80s and was sporting the household equivalents of a mullet, shoulder pads and parachute pants.  It was proudly adorned with gold fixtures, Vegas-pimp lighting, dutch-boy inlaid tiles and the like. And it was a foreclosure that had been vacant for two years before we rescued it. Suffice it to say that nature was well on its way to taking it back: squirrels in the attic, mice and snakes in the crawlspace, etc. For the past two years, we’ve restored it, on our own, room-by-room.  As we near the end of the restoration journey, we’ve begun work on a room that will be most near and dear to my heart.

This is my equivalent of the quintessential man cave. This will be where I scribe my thoughts, ideas and stories…the place where I create the characters that will inhabit the worlds that currently exist only in my head.  I don’t call it my office.  I’ve dubbed it my Writing Lair and I insist that others do the same.

To match the style of my writing and ensure that I can create the proper mood, I assembled a series of photos to show my wife what I wanted.  I want colors and furniture and accents that “could” be considered classically creepy, gothic even. I don’t want cheap overt cheese or theatrical crap. I want the stuff that looks like it could come together to generate the spooky vibe that tends to run through my work.  To my great joy, she approved the look and feel hands down, no changes. (This rarely happens peeps!) No pictures of my plans for you to see because I don’t want to spoil it. But, now that demolition has begun, I will be posting photos of the work in progress.

For those of you that have a creative space of your own (writing or otherwise), what do you do to get your groove on?  As work progresses, I’d love to hear your ideas on how you get the creative juices flowing in your “lair”!

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