set up my home office

I’m sitting at my desk in our new office, which is finished!

Well, mostly finished. There’s just a few pictures to hang and our magnet board to attach to the wall. But aside from that it’s all finished.

Happy happy joy joy – here’s to a more productive us!

Everything’s done except the floor now, oh and I should go and remove the odd bit of masking tape left over from painting. The nails are punched, the floor is sanded and the painting is complete. The vinyl is being laid on the 18th, so once that’s done I can start moving the office furniture in and setting things up.

It’s getting there. Tomorrow (actually today, just realised it’s 2:15am) we’re finishing the painting, punching in all the floorboard nails and sanding the uneven bits. On Thursday the man from the carpet store is coming to measure the room and show us some samples of really thick feltbacked vinyl. It should do the job nicely.

Well, in the last few hours the furniture and junk have been removed from the room and the carpet pulled up. The lino underneath was in too much of a mess to keep, so after a deep breath we took the plunge and ripped it up too. The room is now just bare floorboards and a heap of staples and tacks that still need to be pulled up.

The room was originally part of the verandah so the floor boards aren’t flush and have cracks between them. You can see right through to the ground :) Far too open and drafty to leave it that way, so tomorrow morning we are off to investigate our options for recovering it. We’re thinking maybe lino rather than carpet, but will check out both.

In the meantime, our dining table is groaning under the weight of far too many cds and books. Time to get started on a purge I think!

This is my primary goal for the next couple of weeks. Today I have started pulling everything out of the room and putting it on the verandah. Once it’s all moved out we’re going to pull up the old carpet. We’re still undecided on the new carpet, so for now it may just be left at the old lino underneath. It’s perhaps from the 1940’s? So old it’s almost back in fashion ;-) If there’s wear spots on it I figure I can put down a mat to cover the worst bits.

... we already have a home office, but the room is going to become our son’s bedroom so the office stuff has to shift out.

The new home office will be in the sunroom, a small room that’s actually a built-in section of our verandah. It’s currently where the ironing board and linen cupboard live so my first job is to work out what’s going to happen with them!

The next job is to get the carpet redone, some kind of low pile hardwearing stuff I think, and then figure out how the office furniture is going to fit. We will have to downsize to fit it all in, so the big spacious desk may have to go.

Once the logistics are worked out the furniture shifting can begin.

Yet another goal that is changing because I am getting married. lol. I’ll be setting up my home office a little later than intended. Once my things are unpacked and sorted…

Today I WILL do this.

Yes, the cabling has been done and I’m writing this in my office. Plenty of extra things I can do to make it even more functional (as noted in last entry) but they can be the subject of other goals.

Although it turns out that I won’t have to reconfigure the ADSL network, I’m just going to have to buy a Macbook or Macbook Pro with at least 2GB of RAM so that I can run Windows as well via Parallels. There’s too much competition for using the Windows desktop that we currently have.

And in the long run I’d like an inexpensive voip service for calling to phones (of course I prefer Skype to Skype calls but that’s often not possible).

And… there’s also the fax machine that I have lying dormant. I don’t think voip is up to handling faxes reliably yet so I may need to invest in another phone line.

Anyway, these things are for later. Once the cabling has been done I’m going to consider this goal done.