My New Home Office

As part of some recent home renovations, I was able to convert a room on the first floor of my home from its former use as an exercise room into a home office of my very own. For the last 10 years I’ve shared an office upstairs with my wife and kids. Now that my wife’s real estate practice is established, she needs more room to spread out. It was time to move downstairs. During the renovation we freshened up the color scheme and replaced the carpet but we left the mirrored wall in place. I wasn’t sure if this was a good idea or not. On the one hand it would be expensive and messy to remove the mirrors (they were glued to the wall). On the other hand I was afraid that it might be seen as just a bit odd. Now that it is done, I like the way it turned out and the mirrors will remain.

If you study the pictures with care you will see a number of Byte magazine cover prints. I had purchased 4 of these from the artist (Robert Tinney) in the late 1980′s. When I put them in fresh frames they looked really good and I bought 4 more from his eBay store. These are all limited edition prints and they really establish the theme of the office.

Behind the door on the right:

Will be found this well-equipped home office. Here’s a view from the door:

This is what it looks like from my chair. That’s a 24″ Samsung monitor.

I have a video projector set up on the second port of my video card. I can look up from my chair to see the image projected on the far wall. I set up the monitors so that the cursor rolls off the top of the LCD and onto the bottom of the projected image. This is the most natural setup because the projected image is above my monitor when I am seated. Courtesy of the mirror, there’s an extra image to the left. This is not a distraction in practice.

My guest chairs (and a picture of Carmen):

My bookcase. I still have to do some more cleaning and organization. There’s a sliver of my son Andy on the left!

This is the view from behind the monitor. I tied up all of the cables using some Mille-Ties from Radio shack and then wrapped them in Gardner Bender flexible tubing (see the ‘Before’ picture below):

A window of my very own. You can’t see it, but I hung a bird feeder on the outside too:

These are the Mille-Ties. They are like cable ties but more flexible:

This is what my cables looked like before I cleaned them up. This is why computers are not welcome in many houses:

And that’s my new workspace. What do you think?