Thinking about a reading nook

Most of the basement is done, but there's a corner that needs a good idea — suggestions welcome!

I recently read an article about Olympic athletes who go through a sort of depression after the Games, no matter how they performed, due to the lack of an outlet for their pent-up anxiety and energy. “Coming down is the hardest thing,” as Tom Petty said.

It’s a feeling I know well — not because of my athletic exploits, but because I experience that same sense of being unmoored whenever I finish a project, achieve some goal, or am simply on the back side of some positive experience. Crossing items off my list is a great feeling; crossing all of the items off my list is a prescription for a crash.

Recently I’ve been inching toward that tipping point. After finishing installing my heating system, I spent a few weeks adding trim, doors, touching up paint, and other punch-list items. The money really is in the details, as Tommy Silva says, and these “final” fixes have further elevated the basement, which is now where I spend a considerable part of every day.

The basement renovation was more than just these two rooms (it also deals with a storage room, bathroom, and utility room), but these are the two that are worth seeing. Doors, hardware, trim, artwork — it's finally really coming together.

And while there is plenty more to do (flooring, bathroom, redoing the stairs, electric fireplace, furniture, more artwork, etc.), and plenty more projects I have in my list (refinishing patio furniture and swinging bench, replacing firewood box tops, building storage cabinets for the laundry room and storage room, making a new foyer table, etc.) the reality is that more further progress or new projects will need to wait for my savings to catch up to my vision.

But there is one thing I think I can proceed on to stave off my crash and that’s addressing a funky spot in one corner of my office. It’s funky because at the top of the corner is a small bulkhead that is crying out to be incorporated into some kind of built-in unit. It’s also the part of my office that anyone videoconferencing with me sees during our call.

The question is, what do I do? Currently I have my mom’s old travel easel with a painting she did of my wife drinking her morning coffee. I like it, but it takes up a lot of space and still leaves the spot feeling kind of empty.

I could simply hang art on the wall — the aforementioned painting, another piece, or a group of pieces. But, I feel like it calls out for a built-in bookshelf that would incorporate the bulkhead and provide a handsome background to my calls.

“What do I do?” isn’t just a rhetorical question. I really am looking for ideas. Initially I was thinking a built-in bookcase or even floating shelves would look nice. I turned to AI and asked it to show me what that’d look like:

How might a built-in bookcase look in that corner? Here's what AI came up with.

I can’t say any of these really make my heart sing. So then I turned to Google image search. Most the images I found there didn’t really work for this space either, but one image sparked my mind:

I quite like this concept, even though it’s not a perfect fit for my space.

Maybe the answer is to incorporate some kind of seat or bench? Again, I turned to AI to explore possibilities. It came up with some goofy ideas, but also kind of interesting? There are obvious problems with these, but it also seems like there’s something to them, no?

These AI-generated images are all problematic, but maybe they point the way toward a possibility?

Anyway, I’d love to get more ideas. What do you think I should do? I’d appreciate any thoughts or ideas you have. Please leave them in the comments.