Little Office Little Update - January 2024
So I’m only about, oh… three months late posting this update. Classic me. The construction work I’m about to show off has been done for ages, but I kept putting off writing about it until everything was “perfect.” Finally realized that day might never come, so here we are!
I’ve actually been pretty excited about how this space is coming together, especially considering what I had to work with. It’s the little victories that keep me going - like figuring out how to mount storage in a way that doesn’t make the room feel like a closet.
The Space Struggle
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room - or rather, the complete lack of room for an elephant. My workspace is TINY. We’re talking 5ft by 8ft tiny. Why so small? Well, the rest of the garage apparently needs to store “important things” like “family belongings” and “actual garage stuff.” I briefly considered staging a coup for more territory, but family politics being what they are, I knew that battle was lost before it began.
So instead of complaining (much), I’ve tried to make every single inch count. When your entire office is the size of some people’s coat closets, you get pretty obsessive about space optimization.
Bringing in the Professionals
Confession time: I didn’t build any of the actual structure myself. Look, some people can be trusted around power tools - I am not one of those people. My other half has explicitly forbidden me from using anything more dangerous than a hot glue gun after The Incident We Don’t Talk About. Besides, our home insurance probably has a specific “Joseph exclusion clause” for construction work.
So I hired a builder with three main requirements:
- Split the garage with a partition wall and false ceiling
- Build a workbench along the entire wall
- Add more than one sad little power outlet (the garage originally had just ONE)
I also had two non-negotiable conditions: it needed to be relatively cheap (I was saving my money for the fun stuff to go inside), and it needed to be something I could demolish in a day if we ever sell the house. I’m not having some potential buyer walk away because “the garage has been ruined” - nope, one day with a sledgehammer and it’s back to boring-garage status if needed.
Oh, and I had to surrender part of my already tiny kingdom for a spare fridge. That’s right - in the world’s smallest office, I still had to give up space for kitchen overflow. The sacrifices I make…
Operation: Make It Less Depressing
Once the builder finished and cleared out, I could finally start the fun part - making this place look less like a prison cell. My goal was simple: get this place functional ASAP because I had a pile of tech toys just waiting to be unpacked.
I’m not ashamed to admit my motivation here - I was like a kid on Christmas morning who couldn’t open his presents until his room was clean. That printer wasn’t going to set itself up!
Now everything has been painted white, it’s boring, this was because of three reasons. Firstly white paint is easily found for different surfaces and purposes, second, it’s cheap and I like cheap for functional things. The space only has a single light in the ceiling and I wanted to make the space as bright as possible without adding additional lights up there, and white does the job.
The other reason for painting all this is because of dust. Garages are dusty, not because they’re not cleaned, but because bricks and concrete generate dust. Now considering that I will be spending most of my time here, and it’s going to have electronics and some of them are sensitive dust is the enemy. So by painting the bricks with masonry paint, I’m sealing the brickwork, therefore it stops the dust from becoming a problem.
Next was the concrete floor. First I sealed the floor with a few coats of thinned-down PVA glue, which means that the micro holes in the ground a filled, and made the surface smoother. Then I finished the floor with a couple of coats of garage concrete floor paint. This was added to the walls and slightly onto the brickwork to form a seal around the edge.
Then there was the ceiling and the fake wall, which are plasterboard, these just got a couple of coats of a cheap white emulsion.
Finally, the desk was painted, firstly to protect the surface, and also just to make it a little bit more presentable. This was just done with some wood paint as that’s well what the desk is made from.
Computer Space
This is where I’ll be parked most days. Not just for my random projects, but also for my actual job since I work from home. So it needed to pull double duty without driving me crazy.
First up was the monitor situation. I wanted something that could handle all my machines - two work laptops, my desktop, plus my Pi400. Since my desk is crazy shallow (thanks, tiny room dimensions), I ended up wall-mounting the monitor. Seriously, even if you’ve got plenty of space, consider mounting your monitor - it frees up so much desk real estate it’s ridiculous.
My next headache was shared peripherals. I refuse to have multiple keyboards, mice, speakers and webcams cluttering up my already minimal space. After some digging, I found this USB switch on Amazon that lets me bounce between machines with a button press. All my speakers, webcam, and mic stay connected and switch over instantly. I’ve also added a powered USB hub mounted under the desk near my project area, so I can quickly connect whatever random gadget I’m tinkering with to whichever computer I’m using.
Last additions were a chair (because standing desks are great until hour six of a workday) and a whiteboard. The chair was a total score - got it from a local office furniture recycler for dirt cheap, and they even delivered. As for the whiteboard - non-negotiable for me. I’m stupidly visual with software design, and no fancy digital tool can beat the speed of scribbling on a board. Plus, I feel like a proper genius when I’m standing in front of it gesturing wildly at my own chicken scratch.
Project Space
The project area is where electronics and 3D prints go to either become something awesome or get completely mangled, depending on the day. I deliberately separated this from my computer zone to maintain some semblance of work/play boundaries (and to keep solder off my work keyboard).
Storage was my biggest challenge here. After trying a few systems, I landed on these stackable component boxes from Printables. Fired up the printer, made about two dozen of them, and now I have a place for all my random bits and bobs.
I also went all-in on the Gridfinity system Zack Freedman came up with. If you’ve never seen it, it’s basically a modular storage grid where everything locks together - think nerdy Lego for your desk. There’s a whole official spec that people follow so all the pieces play nice together. I’m obsessed enough with this system that it deserves its own post someday - I’ve printed probably 50+ Gridfinity bins and tools at this point.
I know this area will evolve as I actually start using it heavily, but it’s a solid starting point. At least now I can find my resistors without dumping out three different boxes of “miscellaneous electronic stuff” on the floor.
Next On The List
This workspace is definitely a work in progress. My next big addition will be wall storage with IKEA Skadis pegboards. They come in various sizes so I can tetris them onto my weird wall spaces, plus the 3D printing community has created approximately eight million compatible accessories you can just download and print.
I also need better lighting - the single ceiling light makes this place feel like an interrogation room when I’m working late. Planning to add a monitor light, a task light over my project area, and some LED strips inside my printer enclosure.
Finally, that big empty wall is just begging for some personality. Needs to be lightweight stuff though - probably some posters or canvas prints. And yes, Miku will definitely make an appearance somewhere. It’s not a proper nerd cave without at least one anime character watching over your work, right?