When I went freelance one of the main things I resolved to do was to work from home. This was more out of circumstance rather than to be hip. But it blended in pretty well with the things that were going on with my life. But at that time, my workstation consisted of a large dining table and a few racks in the upstairs family room. And we were living with our in-laws. Somehow, the setup never seemed permanent.
We moved to our own place a couple of weeks ago and while planning out the house, one of the main things we considered was a dedicated home office for me. And the house had an ideal room for this which was an intended guest room which is kind of cut-off from the rest of the house. This was ideal as it would allow me to to separate my work and personal lives and even would allow me to allow clients or staff to visit me without getting those activities disturb or blend in with my personal life.
I wanted to have a separate office in order to have a place that will demarcate my work life from my personal life as well as allow me to get things done. This was going to be my personal space and it was important for me as a person working from home, I felt the need to have some personal space for my self. All of us, at some point or the other run in to our offices to get away from home and a office was more or less out own kingdom. I needed to create such a space within the home and it was going to be my Home Office!
While the house was being renovated, I spent numerous hours on the Internet going through home office setups, reading numerous articles on productive home office setups to work stations and desks and even Feng Shui.
One of the best home offices that inspired me was Mitch Haile’s home office in Boston. Unfortunately my home office was not so big, but I really wanted to create a workstation that was a U.
I also wanted to have enough storage space to stack my book collection, enough room to keep all my computers (not many now, but hoping to add a few over time), a cozy chair for reading and couple of workstations to allow two people to come over and work at my office. So it was a challenge to fir all of these into my intended office room was only 14’ by 10’10”.
I think I spent the most amount of time trying to decide and design my ideal workstation. The challenge was I wanted it to have all the space I wanted as I would be spending majority of my wake hours there, but at the same time didn’t want it to take more than half the room. I wanted to leave half the room for the other two workstations that I wanted to setup for my future team.
So I tried out many of the tools to plan out my office. The most recommended was Google Sketchup, but I found it too cumbersome to use. And I for some reason the plan kept getting distorted and I found it too difficult to design some of the elements that I wanted to design. For example, when I designed a rack, Sketchup ended up converting it to a cupboard.
Then I found this great online software, called floorplanner.com. And here is the design I did with it:
And due to financial factors I am furnishing the office in two stages. The first stage will consist of repurposing some of the existing furniture. I am still a bit torn between the look that I want to have for the office. I am torn between a more modernistic look with sleek modern looking furniture and a more stately look with more antique looking furniture. The furniture that I have done exactly fall into either category. So I guess the look will have to wait till I redo the office some day. But right now, I am not keen on spending money in an office room. I should be able to complete the setting up by the end of week and hopefully I will be able to post some photos once it is done.
The next major component is the technological aspects of setting up a home office. I think that deserves a post of it own. Here too I am planning on using most of my existing equipment. But there are a couple of things that I want to spend money on, one of them being a kick ass, high performance desktop machine. I am getting tired of cramped keyboards and screens of the laptops. I need to setup a multi-monitor workstation to boost my productivity. But that is a post of its own.
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