New Year, New Work Space

Work space (office, desk, cube, table) is at a premium in our dept. Grad students dont' get offices or cubes, and my major beef is that we don't even get a dedicated desk to work at and call our own. We do get a bookshelf (sort of a laugh when you do history and all you do is read books), and will soon be getting lockers. Our department is divided between sympathetic and unsympathetic, and I won't go into it any further than that.

The major problem for me is that I don't work well in large open public spaces (our current computer lab) b/c I just want to talk to everyone, and I work best when I can "nest" a little bit. I am a visual person and need to be able to set up my materials (notes, timelines, books, etc), work, leave them, and then come back a few hours/days later. The current semi-nomadic situation means I carry all my stuff around on my back (I can't even count the number of times people have said, "wow, that's a really big, heavy looking backpack", or called me a turtle) and I lose a lot of my workflow b/c I'm always putting stuff out and then putting it back into my pack. For the past 3 years I've worked mainly on my love seat (it has a serious Irishred butt divot), strewing my work all over our living room and kitchen table - much to the delight of L you can be sure. But this situation - for ergonomic reasons as much as marital harmony - cannot be maintained.

In full disclosure, we have a 2 bedroom place and set the downstairs up as an office. But the space was atrociously set up, the furniture didn't fit, and the windows are shaky single paned 30+ year old "barriers" against our chilly winters. Now, this isn't rural Maine, but most CA architecture built in the 70s was built with the "it's CA, it's warm 365 days a year" attitude. Which was cold enough in LA, and considering we're in the 40s and 30s here at night in the winter, pretty cold here too. Oh yeah, and the heater (which is located upstairs) doesn't effectively push hot air downstairs (heat rises bit), making it a pretty chilly work space. Plus, I get lonely when i work from home - no one to talk to or use to procrastinate.

That being said, I'll also cop to being a wuss and recognize that it was purely my laziness, cheapness, and SoCal whimpyness that had me avoiding our office like the plague. It's not as much the space as me being unwilling to do to the space what needed to be done.

So, my birthday came around, I had some extra cash and i decided to build myself a home office. Here's the old space:


Here's the new:



It still looks a little chaotic b/c of the cables, but by getting rid of the big L-shaped desk I cleared up a lot of room. I also redid the bookshelf to make room for those hundreds of books coming my way (as soon as I get my tochus to the library). My new desk has all kinds of fancy things like drawers, a sliding place for my laptop and a keyboard tray! (these are all elements the couch and coffee table lacked). I also shelled out a whopping $25 for a beautiful, adjustable office chair and $5 for an ergonomic keyboard. If you live near me, I highly recommend going to our university's surplus store: lots of really great stuff for not very much moolah.

I'm currently very happy, let's see how it works.