The Home Office

A post from Chuck Huckaby at the work-at-home-business-opportunities blog made me start thinking about my own home office. My office is in one of the two "finished" rooms in our below grade basement. Prior to its transformation into my work space the room was the typical catch all storage room. So I cleared out all the junk (bought some new shelving for the greater basement to hold what I didn't want to throw out), scraped off the strip of hippopotamus wall paper (in a former life with previous owners it was a child's bedroom - for some reason we always called the room the rhino room, even though the deco was obvious hippo's), and threw on a coat of paint. The previous owners had taken the carpet with them, leaving us with the bare concrete floor. After shopping around for rugs, carpeting, remnant carpets, I decided I could get by with two old rugs (one oval and one rectangular) that combined covered maybe 80% of the floor. We had an old computer desk that worked fine for my laptop and small laser printer. The larger combo inkjet printer/scanner was relegated to a 70's era sofa end table that was a hand me down from my mother-in-law. We had some old unused dining room chairs, so I claimed one of these for my desk chair. After sitting on the wooden chair for more that a couple of hours my butt starts hurting so I added an old sofa throw pillow for cushioning. I did buy two portable folding table and a storage shelf to hold my book making supplies and inventory.

Total cost in setting up office? Maybe $200.00 (not including computer equipment.) Though I may have to look around for a used office chair to replace that old dining room chair with the green sofa pillow...