It’s Office-ial
Uncle Andrew
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…. π―
12 Responses to “It’s Office-ial”
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April 15th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
You are not the only one using those wire shelves for server racks.
One of our past customers had an entire server room that was nothing but those racks packed to the gills with Dell small form factor desktops. To keep the racks well ventilated they used box fans hanging off the back of the racks with zip ties. The best part was they were selling these systems as dedicated web hosting servers to customers who would never guess what a ghetto setup they were entrusting their enterprise internet needs.
As for our contract. They would occasionally call us and tell us to punch the power button on a server or help them knock the accumulated ice off their A/C.
April 15th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Ha! That’s pretty ghetto all right. I guess I could start advertising myself as a “dedicated Web hosting service” now. π
April 16th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Very nice setup! And I was very relieved to see Fernando in the last shot. I was getting worried as picture after picture rolled by, and yet no Fernando, because your office without Fernando – not to be thought of.
One question – are you going to leave the walls just bare concrete? Because without any covering/insulation, I imagine that office will get darn cold come winter. Or does the ductwork behind your chair serve to keep you warm?
April 16th, 2008 at 8:21 am
Yeah, the concrete’s staying. Personally I like the look of it. Not a problem, though, IMHO: Between the three computers, the furnace and the water heater all leaking BTUs I think it should be fine.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Glad to hear you have the heat situation covered. And if you like the raw concrete look, all the better. But if you ever think about decorating your walls…
…I’m thinking the axe in particular would look mighty nice. π
(And if the image doesn’t appear in the post, go here to view it.)
April 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Yow, nice unnatural axe!
April 16th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
Nice diggs Roo! You could have a Drywall guy do a skip- trowel texture (really smooth with a few low spots, aka Santa Fe or Cloud) right on the concrete and then paint. Inexpensive and looks very finished. But do you really think shutting off your charging station will make a noticeable difference in the face of 4 servers, 3 monitors, 2 printers, a set of track lights and a partridge in a pear tree?
April 17th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Why can no one understand this? I like the concrete. My father-in-law is all over my ass tfor me to paint it, Margaret thinks it’ll be a dust-magnet (which would at least mean that dust wasn’t clogging my case fans), Dalek’s worried about heat loss, and now you. Go paint your own walls!
I’m not sure why, but I get a real kick out of the idea of sinking concrete anchors to hang my pictures on the wall.
Um, yes: it will make a difference roughly equivalent to the amount of energy wasted by leaving five AC adaptors plugged in all them time whether they’re being used or not. And it would make twice as much difference if you were to do it too. π
April 18th, 2008 at 10:38 am
LOL – I’m not worried about heat loss if you’re not, Roo; I just know it’s a factor. As you might recall, the walls of The Computer Cave in our house are nothing but concrete, and it does get chilly down there in the winter (just ask fisherbear). It’s awfully nice in the summer, though.
You could always appease the “you must decorate this!” masses by bolting a couple of shackles to the concrete walls and tell folks that you’re going for the medieval-dungeon look… π
April 18th, 2008 at 11:53 am
April 23rd, 2008 at 6:53 am
Heat loss? If it gets cold just just turn the server rack around and blow all that nice warm air your direction. As for the concrete look, you can always start up Survival Comics again, this time live from the bunker. π π By the by, Holly just brought home that same bookcase from Ikea. I just hope she isn’t going to wait around for me to assemble it…
April 23rd, 2008 at 11:13 am
Actually, I’ve noticed over the last couple of weeks that this room tends to stay a bit warmer than the rest of the house, since the furnace, the water heater and my server all live down here. We keep our house at a daytime max of 65Λduring the Winter, and I would bet it’s at least 67 in here right now. Maybe I ought to go get me a digital thermometer….
Hey now! Since we stopped having to kill the odd mastodon that attempted to invade our cave, Ikea furniture assembly has become one of our few remaining domestic manly duties. You don’t get to weasel out of this just because it’s not a home-entertainment system. π