We did something huge this week.

Our seemingly permanently placed glass desk is nestled in the corner of our living room between the pink blush sofa and a rich, red Persian rug. An iMac lives next to a long, arched monitor that extends forever. I’ve spent the last 4 years (minus a break in Italy) slaving away 8-5 in this corner of the living room. Even after completing my master’s degree, where I took a break from desktop life, I found myself magnetized towards the beautiful dual screens, the ease of pulling up as many tabs and Excel spreadsheets as possible.

Over the course of the summer, my husband encouraged me to venture out of the house and away from my “AI and food waste reduction” obsession. “Go to a coffee shop!” he’d implore. Yet, I always used my beautiful dual monitor and $600 office chair I stole from my first job as an excuse to stay put in our 1-bedroom condo in Uptown. Plus, we have cats! Why would I leave them? The perfect coworkers.

This excuse lived on even after the bulk of my research project was completed. I’d wake up, enjoy my morning espresso, and migrate to the corner of the room to work for hours on end, the day slipping away without thought.

This week, though, everything changed. We’ve been meaning to re-nest in our home since returning from 9 months in Italy this past July. Somehow, though, this intention got lost in my endless interviews with CEOs and technologists, my mind absorbed into a project with no emotional finish line. My husband and I woke up one morning, and a conversation about redoing our home sparked something.

We spent the next three hours rearranging our house into different patterns. We slogged the glass desk from the living room into the corner of the kitchen, removed lighting fixtures to re-orient the room’s center of gravity. We moved our TV + heavy console around three times, pushed our piano to a new spot, and oriented our fake Eames lounge chair in a new direction. Originally, we had discussed what furniture we needed to buy to make our home “more perfect”, but it turned out that removing furniture was actually the key to unlock more space—physical and emotional—in our home.

Now, our living room allows light to stream in like never before. The added space allows my husband and me to each lounge with our own intention and not feel crammed.

More importantly, I haven’t plugged in the dual monitor system since then, and this is the first morning I’ve ventured out to a new coffee shop, Side Practice Coffee, and immersed myself in a Colombian pourover that blows my typical Nespresso pod out of the water.

A new world has opened up.