The Home Office Makeover
One of the things I’ve been working on the last couple of months — slowly — is a makeover of the home office. The office was, honestly, a collection of things I threw into it over the years, and now that I’m not working for anyone else, I felt it was time to spruce it up and make it a bit more compatible with how I expect to use it in the future.
There were two big problems with the old setup. I have two desks in the office, one a sit/stand desk for the computer and monitors, which is fine, and one I use for writing and projects, which was, honestly, a couple of particle board and laminate drawer boxes that I shoved a desk top on top of. The office actually had four of those drawer boxes, some of which were over a decade old — not bad for$75 on Amazon flat packs — but a few of the drawers were starting to fall apart, and honestly, I’m just done with particle board covered with black laminate. And the space between the two chests holding up the desk slab (also particle board covered in black laminate) was too narrow to actually get me legs under the desk, so I had to use it side-saddle. Not really optimal or conducive to productivity, so in practice, it mostly got used as a place to dump stuff.
My first priority was to replace those chests. It turns out on Amazon, if you use the phrase “solid wood” or “real wood” it’ll show you things made out of wood instead of particle board. I ended up buying a couple of tall, 8 drawer chests made by Linon for about $100 apiece and with some re-organization and a bit of thoughtful Goodwilling, I was able to merge all four of the old chests into the two new ones with a couple of empty drawers for later expansion (what Adam Savage calls "baby fat”).
The thing that I spent a lot of time arguing with myself about was the desk. I tried to convince myself to buy one with a solid Walnut slab for a desk top, but the cheapest ones I would remotely consider buying and using started around $800 and went up from there, I just couldn’t justify that investment to myself, so ultimately, I found a desk by some random Chinese firm called FurniChoi for < $200 that was the right size and had metal legs that I thought were interesting.
The Linon boxes and the desk all were made with Pine, or some close equivalent. This isn’t fancy wood, but it actually looks nice and has a decent finish to it. For under $400, I replaced the furniture that needed updating with good pieces that’ll hold up well, and aren’t black and covered with laminate. The desk is nicely sturdy with no wiggle, which makes me happy, and is big enough I don’t need to use it side saddle any more.
Another change I wanted to make was to keep the desk as clear of stuff as possible, so I added a floating shelf above it to hold the bits and bobs I had on the desk. Since I’m using the desk for things like Lego builds now, I wanted to minimize clutter and maximize usable space. I added a small two drawer valet, mostly as a place to velcro the charger to and contain the gear being charged, since I didn’t want to attach velcro to the desk itself (unlike what I did to abuse the laminates), and a nice leather desk cover I found on Etsy, which I love and which softens the edges when I lean on them with my arms.
The overall configuration of the office didn’t change, because while I tried a number of different setups, I ended up going back to the way I had the desks set, with the project desk against the wall and the computer desk opposite it letting me sit in the middle and shift to both easily. The desk setup takes up about half the office and it lets me site next to the window so I can look out where I have the birdbath and feeders, and where I can grab the camera if something interesting shows up out there. One of those 8 drawer boxes holds everything I use regularly at the desks.
The other half of the office has always been the place I dump stuff. It has my printers and printer paper, my camera bags, etc, etc.It also is where the NAS, WIFI router and the UPS live, so in practice it became my IT closet, and was just a big hunk of clutter. I decided that as long as I was working on this, I’d put some organization into it, so I added a two shelf high unit and a new printer stand that allowed me to stay the two printers on top of each other, and that’s where the other 8 drawer ended up living. The printers are, by the way, a Brother color laser which is used for general printing, and the Canon Pro 300, which is only for photo prints. I like both of them, and so far, both have been painless. And we do still do enough printing that it makes sense to have the Brother, although it’s really used as much as a copier at this point.
The are finally feels like something other than a clutter dump and I can actually find things, and even the camera bags aren’t just tossed on the floor.
The last wall are the book cases, and I pulled all the books out, organized them and did some editing, removing a bankers box of books to be donated into new lives.
This house has two levels, with the downstairs being a small apartment area we think was originally added as an elder suite, and which was later rented out. It has two small bedrooms, a small living room and a kitchen/dining area, all basic, but rather nice. We’ set up the other bedroom with a small bed and chair and use it mostly as a quiet/reading room that can be a guest bedroom if we need it, and the dining area is Laurie’s office. The living area is set up as, more or less, a lounge and is where we have a TV and where my XBOX is for when I’m gaming. Nice and comfy. The only significant change here is I finally got around to moving the TV up onto a wall mount, which frees up the space on the table below it.
The last thing I’ve been doing is re-thinking the decorations. All the art and the various bits of life got pulled down and curated. Here in the lounge you can see my gargoyle, which graced every office I worked in going back to my early days at Apple, and Barfy, the bear that went to many sharks (and spiders!) games before he retired, mostly to the amusement of the refs. Also you can see the Mac 128K I acquired a few years back.
I am finally finishing the last piece of the makeover: printing a couple of my images, framing them and getting them up on the wall. One things I wanted to do was get some new images up there — most of my images were from before we moved to Washington and I wanted some images taken more recently.
I ended up choosing two. One is an Immature Bald eagle take last May about five minutes from the house at a known bald eagle hangout, and the other had to be Sandhill Cranes, a favorite species of mine I’ve watched and photographed a lot over the years, and that was taken at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge about a year ago. I am hoping to replace these images once or twice a year as I create new, interesting images.
These were the first images I’ve printed since I started my shift from Lightroom Classic to Lightroom. Lightroom doesn’t have a print module, so you have to export to Photoshop to print, but with basically no drama, I was able to create two nice 11x14 prints, which will, I think, finish off this makeover, at least for now. And for way less than I originally expected to spend, but this setup should work for me for a few years with only minor tweaks,
