So you want to work from home!
So you want to work from home? You want to join the thousands who have fled the stuffy air conditioned environment of the corporate office world to set up their own office in their own home and you are damned if it wont be perfect.
Well I don’t blame you! Let me try and give you a few pointers on what to consider and where to go when setting up your home office, I will try and cover the basics of setting up your ideal home office with the equipment you want but will stay clear of the PC versus MAC argument as that just gets nasty.
The spare room or the kitchen?
Now this may seem like a silly question but you would be surprised as to where some people think is a good location for there home office i.e. next to your teenage sons bedroom may not be the best of ideas.
Granted with a little clever use of space and hiding of wires almost any space in your home can be turned into a workable office area as long as you have access to plug sockets and a telephone line.
However this said, think for a minute about where would be a good location for your office, for example do you have a spare room that you could convert or maybe you are lucky enough to have a study that you could just throw a desk into. This is aspect is probably the most important step of setting up your home office.
Things to Consider:
• How much time will you be spending in the office, will you be working a full day there five days a week or do you spend a lot of time out in meetings etc
• How many distractions are there in your home, do you have children or pets that you need to keep your working environment separate from?
• How much light do you need in your office? If you are a designer you will have different light requirements
• How much space do you need in your office, do you trawl through a lot of books while working and need lots of space or do you stick to a small neat contained working area.
Maybe you have a separate outside area that would make a good office or even consider the investment of erecting fancy log cabin office in the garden, just be careful that the commuting times wont hinder your new found working freedom.
The main reason for people setting up a functional home office is that mainly they have broken from the constraints of regular employment, and have set up their own business to work under their own rules. This ethos should be applied to all aspects of your work including your new office, why set up your office based on the blueprint of your old job, give yourself exactly what you want.
Equip your control room
Ok, so, you have either decided that you are going set up your home office on the roof of your house far away from all distractions or maybe more practically you are going to clear out the spare room throw open the curtains and build yourself your ideal working environment.
So what equipment do you need in your new office, well let’s talk general requirements here, I don’t think my particular taste in comedy calendars is going to be particularly relevant here.
• Make sure you can control the temperature in your office so you can work in comfort. Recommended working temperatures are between 19 to 23 degrees centigrade. Minimum working temperature is 16 degrees centigrade so any lower than that and you can send yourself home.
• Equally as important as temperature is lighting, take into consideration the type of bulbs you use and whether or not you have them on a dimmer switch. It is also worth fitting the right type of blinds on any windows in your new office so you can control the natural light as well.
• A vitally important decision to get right is your seating arrangements. Why buy the cheapest chair in the shop? That’s what you are trying to escape, go and try some out, see what level of posterior padding you require.
• The Desk/workspace, as I have mentioned the requirements for this very important piece of office kit are solely down to the type of business you work in. If you are a designer for example you may feel more comfortable with two desks or a large curved unit to provide additional space for technical drawings etc.
There is a vast range of desks available on the market now catering for all possible requirements, so it is a good idea to shop around and see what style of desk suits you. You may need the desk to hide office equipment such as printers and routers or simply hold files or both.
A lot of people like to take the route of sourcing a vintage desk from an antiques market, now while this is a very stylish and often cheaper alternative, remember these are antiques and may not serve the purpose you are looking for in your modern workspace.
• You will more than likely need additional storage in your office for files in the shape if filing cabinets and the like, make sure that if you do add filing cabinets, storage cupboards etc that you do not end up with an office full of storage with no room for you to work.
• It may not seem like a priority when setting up your office but music does tend to play a major part in peoples working environments and it is worth getting a decent radio or set of computer speakers to fill the void where once there was idle office chatter.
The Machine Problem
An office of almost any sort in today’s working environment is filled with little machines, by this I mean machines that do things such as computer’s, router’s, printers and the like. All of these things need places to be so it is well worth your time in thinking about where you will house all of these machines.
Having a piece of office equipment such as a well thought out computer desk that can house and more importantly hide the majority of this equipment while still giving you a comfortable working space is going to pay dividends in years to come as you will not be tripping over the wretched wires that keep these things going.
So as you can see just touching on the basics of what to actually consider when setting up your home office is a bit of a task so make sure you give it plenty of thought and shop around for what you want.
Oak furniture at Foaky
