I’ve been working from home more lately and my current home office isn’t cutting it. It isn’t really a home office. It is an old cheap MDF desk that I’ve had since high school that is sitting against the wall of my “man cave”. In this room, I have a pool table, bar, poker table, and theatre/video game area. It isn’t the best place for a desk.
All of that takes up half of my basement. The other half is a kind of junk room. It has a freezer, home gym, laundry room, bookcases, etc. The idea is to take one small corner of it and make it my home office. Then organize the rest so it can also be a place to store the kid’s toys. Side note, our kid’s current toy room is our living room and bedroom. That needs to change.
The area for my home office is pretty small. Unfortunately it can’t get any bigger since it is boxed in by the doors to the laundry room and the exit doors. The space is about 96” x 86”. I need to fit a large desk area, cabinets, and a couple bookshelves. That is a lot but I think I can make it fit.
This is it minus doors and a few small miscellaneous details. There are two bookshelves on one wall and my desk on the other two. One desk has a keyboard tray and the other is lowered for a laptop or for writing. The large black box on the one desk is my multi-function laser printer. A small color ink jet goes above it on that shelf. Below the printer is a file cabinet. To the left of the keyboard tray is my main computer. Above it will be a pull out shelf with my flatbed scanner. To the right of the keyboard tray is my mini-rack. I’ll have about 15U for my two home servers, switch, UPS, etc.
This is my favorite detail. (Click to enlarge) The back of the desk has a couple doors to allow you to get to the computers. You can easily get to the back of my PC to mess with cables. This is also actually the front of the server rack. Instead of trying to mount the servers from under the desk, I can simply slide them in from here. There will be doors but I’ll add plenty of ventilation. This should cut down on noise and keep them nice and hidden.
Lastly the framing behind the desk is hollow or it has holes between the hidden supports. This will allow me to have great cable management. Everything will be tucked out of the way. I’m currently looking for a nice but cheap three monitor bracket. For now, I’ll put my monitors on the desk but I would like to eventually mount them to give myself a bit more room. There are two 20” 4:3 monitors with a 24” widescreen in the middle.
I’ve attached the sketchup if you would like to take a closer look but please keep in mind that it is still a work in progress. I have a lot of demolition to do before I can get started and some of my measurements may need to change.
What do you think my desk is missing? Are there any cool geeky things you think it needs? Somewhere there will be a popup power/USB hub but there is room for more geeky stuff. If you were building a home office from scratch, what would be on your wishlist?