As part of some, um, reorganization of staff at my place of employment, I have been given the opportunity to work from home. This will start on or before August 5, at which time Life in the Cube (as I’ve known it) will basically be coming to an end. As exciting as this prospect sounds to a girl who is a card-carrying, white-knuckled driver when it’s snowing, it necessitates (shudder!) setting up an office at home.
My current “home office” is actually decentralized: my computer for bill paying and writing and such is in the kitchen. I’m set up at the end of the table which is situated in the corner of the room between two windows (and is sunny all day long, which is why I chose this spot). The filing starts out in a basket on a shelf of the kitchen island, then gets permanently filed in the cabinet in the upstairs spare room, or in binders to the left of the built-in desk in my bedroom. Stamps, stapler, envelopes, pens are kept in a kitchen cabinet.
The built-in desk is a good idea in theory, but in practice? Not so much. It faces a wall (I want a sunny window) and has a flourescent light (I want incandescent), both of which I hate, and therefore is not conducive to any actual work getting done. If I would be working 10.5 hour shifts from home, something (preferably almost everything) had to change.
Our mission (since we choose to accept it) is this: make the spare room into my office.
This might not be as easy as it sounds.
Step one was to check my internet speed to see if it was up to speed.
It was not.
Hello, incompetent technicians from my cable company. It took them 3 tries to get this working correctly and to repair what they damaged while installing the new cable modem. The third time was the charm.
Knock on wood.
Then we emptied out the room. “We” consists of me and my husband, with the emphasis on husband. He did most of the work: taking out the book case, the cd tower, the filing cabinet, the end tables, the love seat.
All of this had to be put somewhere for the interim. That somewhere is our bedroom. It’s sort of overwhelming. The idea of “keeping your eye on the prize” now makes much more sense to me.
Now that the room is emptied, the next step is: Painting and flooring.
To be continued…
Karen Creamer Author, Coach, Speaker 