Okay, finally I'm going to post about the office changes I mentioned ten days ago.
My office is located in the approximately 300 sqft loft area of our A frame home. It's been great to have my office inside the house, but slightly separated from the chaos of our four small children. When I moved my office up in December of 2021, I brought up my big tanker desk, our old couch, and my 3D printers. It's evolved some over the years, but mostly stayed in the same layout. I don't think I have any pictures of the entire office, but here was my desk area:
The wall/ceiling opposite my desk had our old couch against it, with totes behind it. My 3D printers were on the wall to your left if you were sitting at my desk, on a bench I built using an old desk top and my smallest Vidmar cabinet:
When we came home with our newborn daughter at the end of November, I started feeling overwhelmed with the lack of storage and space we had in our home. Moving is out of the question, so I knew that the only option was to be better organized and optimize the space we had. My office was very lacking in terms of space optimization. Here we store some totes with Christmas decor, large baby items, extra kids toys that we swap out, and all of my office/3D printing paraphernalia. The closet in my office is actually our pantry, which is half organized. My plan was to add much more benchtop space so that I could more easily work on projects, package orders, have space for my wife, and eventually also serve as a place for our children to do some schoolwork. I made a model of my office in Fusion 360, and set out researching furniture options.
I wanted the benchtop space to span almost the entire length of the walls, and they needed to be nice and deep to make up for the sloping walls/ceiling of my office. The best bang for the buck I found was Global Industrial workbenches. After hours and hours of deliberating, I settled on a 2.5'x6' workbench for my new desk, and two 3'x8' workbenches forming a U shaped workstation. I also managed to fit a 2'x4'x6' cabinet from Seville Classics in as well which will end up housing all kinds of things.
The new furniture meant that basically all of the old furniture needed to go, so I made the tough decision to sell my beloved General Fireproofing Mode Maker tanker desk. I listed it in the evening and it was claimed a few hours later, and picked up the next morning. We also quickly sold the old couch as well. The first item to arrive was my new desk. These Global Industrial workbenches are extremely robust - the tops are 2" thick solid! Next arrived some new file cabinets that I ordered through Sam's Club, they're cheap but do the job and most importantly, they were the dimensions I needed to fit underneath the workbenches. So here was the new layout of the office for the last 20 days:
Until today, when the remaining two workbenches arrived! What a workout to get the massive 3'x8' 2" thick close to 200lb bench tops up into my office, but my amazing wife and I got it done without breaking anything or anyone getting hurt. I have more organizing to do, the big cabinet I mentioned earlier needs to get put in place once the old Vidmar printer bench is removed, and I eventually want to put the 3D printers in half of the closet area that I mentioned currently serves as our pantry, but here's how it looks as of tonight:
And here is a quick rendering from the Fusion model I mentioned earlier:
So now that this project is finally up to date, I'll keep adding to it as I make more progress. Thanks for looking!
The first year/ newborn phase can be exhausting, but such a special time. But you must be a pro at it.
