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From: RDA

Date: 11/14/08

My wife and I argued about the space at the top of the stairs. We don’t have an attic in this tiny Cape, so I wanted to wall off the area and create a storage closet. Cynthia wanted to put the closet elsewhere and use the space under the roofline as a little home office, with a computer desk. I was holding my own until she suggested that we get Chuck Miller’s opinion.



Around the office, I’ve taken to calling Chuck The Oracle because he knows a lot, remembers everything, and has great ideas. Sometimes we’ll make a pretense of trying to think up a good headline for an article instead of just going into Chuck’s office and asking him to tell us the perfect headline, which is what eventually happens. It’s like racking your brain to remember the actor who played Murray on The Mary Tyler Moore Show instead of just using Google.

I was surprised that Cynthia would submit to arbitration with Chuck. She usually begs me not to ask his opinion because while his ideas are great (skylights, built-ins, cove lighting) and have improved our home in innumerable ways, his ideas have also been know to increase the cost and slow the progress of our renovation.

Well, it wasn’t even close. Chuck thought tucking a desk under the sloping roofline, where a seated person would not be bothered by the limited headroom, was a good use of the space. He said an office nook would feel protected and cozy, but not isolated. And he liked that it would create an open feeling at the top of stairs. I didn’t have a chance after that.

When I turned my attention to designing the home office, I considered extending the balustrade to enclose the space, but I didn’t like the idea that the view through the balusters would be the tangled mess of wires and papers that our home office would inevitably become. I also figured we could use the extra storage, so I built a half-wall for the handrail to die into, with paneling on one side (Chuck’s idea) and bookshelves on the other.



The half-wall is just a big box, made of birch plywood with pine nosing. I applied a framework of pine rails and stiles to create the paneled look. The 1x pieces are joined with pocket screws, a trick I learned from Gary Striegler’s article on wainscoting. I wasn’t sure if I should run baseboard around the whole thing, but I’m glad I did. I capped the unit with a piece of walnut.

Now if I would just repair the drywall I damaged in the process and hook up the electrical, we could actually use the space.


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