This is the ideal office my partner designed, not what my actual office will look like. For a good week or so we believed in its potential reality. It would have a loft and a bookshelf all the way to the almost 16-foot ceiling, the top shelves so high they could only be reached with one of those library rolling ladders.
We started small, but the design just got more and more awesome until it seemed that, well, rather than trying to keep the footprint under 120 sq. feet and the height reasonable enough that we didn’t need a permit, why not just get a permit? This design was awesome enough to warrant the hassle!
It turns out the reason to avoid the permitting process if one can is that it gets expensive really fast. So, no loft. No bookshelves that are only accessible by ladder. We’re back to keeping the office to no-permit-needed dimensions. (The dimensions of a large shed, essentially.) It will still be awesome, just shorter, and a bit more compact overall.
A. L. Rowser 