HOME OFFICE FURNITURE

Crazy but we’re beginning our home office unit even before we’ve painted the room which is mad by anyone’s standards but hey, can’t sit idly twiddling thumbs until it’s warm enough to paint.  Making the most of the dreary winter months by starting the bottom section of the unit before building the bookcases. 

Planning is crucial for this type of project and I can’t stress enough the amount of measuring and re-measuring that takes place in order to come up with a dimensional design plan.  If this is what you need to do to build a wall unit imagine how much planning goes into a mission to Mars?  Ugh!  Finally, after weeks of scribbling, crossing out, scrunching up a million balls of paper, a draft drawing complete with estimated furniture sizes has been produced.

 

Design plan for office base unit

Not being skilled in the dark arts of carpentry or furniture building, time to ask Dr Google for help in searching for office furniture that might fit the bill.  Fortune favours the brave as during the Black Friday sales I bagged a bargain on office furniture at Rymans, managing to buy two desk height cupboards and a pair of filing cabinets small enough to fit into the overall wall area that is to form the base of our unit.

 

R White small office furniture from Ryman

The design is following the black and oak theme started in the lounge half of this room.  The furniture purchased is in a woody colour called English Oak which I plan to trim with black to give it a semi-industrial look. 

On top of all the base furniture will sit a black length of laminate kitchen worktop (Nero Granite) approx. 3 metres long.   Weirdly, if you buy a mottled black coloured worktop it is significantly cheaper than buying a completely matt black one with square edges.  It seems that matt black is ‘on trend’ and we all know what that means – more expensive.

 

Kitchen worktop 60 cm deep x 3 metres long

One very important thing to point out when selecting office furniture – it needs to be of a depth that is smaller than the width of the desk top.  Kitchen worktops tend to come in standard widths mostly 60 cm but a lot of office furniture is deeper than that so bear this in mind if you don’t want joins across your work surface.  

One other thing to bear in mind is a 60 cm surface working area is not really that deep when you’ve got monitors, keyboards or laptops cluttering up the top.  When designing the upper half of an office unit ensure that the central hutch area is wide enough and deep enough to accommodate your computer equipment.  This means you may have to limit the size of the bookcase units in order to give you space to work comfortably.

 

Think carefully about what equipment needs to be accommodated

Sorry if this sounds rather obvious but being a bit dimensionally dim, it was not apparent to me until the worktop got delivered and I suddenly realised that the 30cm deep bookcases would be taking up half the depth. 

Okay – now that we have furniture and a worktop plus a truckload of pineboard, it’s time to think about how it is all going to fit along the wall but more about that later as its started to snow and I need to find a warm radiator to hug for a few hours.