I’m moved into my new office. Not completely, but far enough to be fully functional.

Brief synopsis: after Shawn moved out of our basement, we took out a loan to do some major home improvements. One of these was turning the basement utility room where Shawn had hung his hat into an office for me. As anyone who has peeked through my old office door upstairs can attest, I desperately needed more room for my shit. Out contractor laid drywall over the bare studs on the ceiling and a few walls, threw a couple of phone and coax jacks in, replaced the buzzy old fluorescent lights with track lighting and painted. The result is light years ahead of where I was.

In case you’re in the market, the wire shelf racks they sell at Costco (at the left of the picture above) make excellent improvisational server racks. I’ve got four desktop computers of varying pedigree on the bottom shelf (well, next-to-bottom; the bottom shelf is reserved for Uninterruptible Power Supplies), my printers on the next shelf up, networking equipment (routers, switches) up from there, and the top shelf for storage. The whole thing’s on casters so I can move it away from the wall with ease.

I picked up a couple of used industrial-strength desks from Action Business Furniture down in Tukwila, including a nice corner desk with plenty of room for my three monitors. I pimped it out with a sliding keyboard drawer and was good to go. Between the two desks I have my keyboard, mouse, monitors, scanners, external drives, speakers, MIDI keyboard and fax machine at my fingertips, with room to spare.

One of my favorite innovations is pictured. Back when Shawn was living here we picked up this EXPEDIT bookcase from the scratch-N-dent section at IKEA. I discovered that small moving boxes from Public Storage fit the cubbies to a T, making a perfect storage shelf for all my cables, joiners, hubs, switches, PCI cards, power supplies, et-God-help-us cetera. I plan on filling the bottom 12 cubbies with highly organized crap, leaving the top 4 for incidentals like backpacks and the top for use as a charging station. I even got all of my chargers on a single multi-outlet strip so I can turn them off when not in use, thus saving electricity and keeping Al Gore and Leonardo DiCaprio off my back. Fernando approves!

There are, of course, a drawback or two to my new digs. I’m sharing the office with a noisy roommate: the furnace. It can get pretty rumbly at times. But I’m working on some potential plans to cut the noise down, and even if I can’t do a lot to ameliorate the din, it’s still worth it. And since we just sunk a big wad of cash into upgrading the insulation in the house, the use of the furnace should be far reduced over previous years as well.

All in all, I am utterly delighted with the move. Now, all I have to do is separate all of the pounds and pounds, miles and miles of obsolete chaff out of my technological silo and cart the resulting bales of stuff off to RE*PC to be recycled and finish cleaning out my old office so Margaret can mover her stuff in there in preparation for redecorating her office. The nightmare continues…. 😯