We are endlessly frustrated with books and guides that promise to show a way to do something, but never quite give you enough of the details to actually make it work, or they are so difficult and time consuming that it is unrealistic to even try, so what follows is a simple straight forward guide on how to build the exact same home office as the one we did. Please keep in mind you will need to modify your workspace to fit within the space you have. It is our hope that this guide is fun and a strong impetus for you to look at things in a different way than you might normally, and that is through the lens of adaptive reuse and critical misuse.
Adaptive reuse: adapting something from its original use to a different use
Critical misuse: intentionally using something in a way that it was never intended to be used.
Adaptive reuse and critical misuse both center around the idea of use and more specifically the idea of use in a way that is other than originally intended. The second key element of these two terms is the word ‘use.’ For us, use, is just as important a factor in design. Many times people theorize or speculate without ever doing, producing, or implementing the ideas, and that is fine, but for us beyond the idea is the actual implementation of ‘use.’ Through the adapting and reusing of an under used available space at home and by critically misusing hollow core door slabs we were able to generate a great work space with multiple long term benefits. We were able to save$20,000.00 a year, create more time with family, reduced our commute to almost nothing, and this was all done for less than $300.00 and completed in less than 5 hours.
Adaptive reuse and critical misuse were not the only factors involved in the development of this space, economic realities, amazing technology, and the development of “third places” combined to force, allow and facilitate a small business home based office.
Economic realities forced us to reconsider all of our costs and what benefit we derived from that cost. The largest monthly impact on our business was rent, followed by fuel cost/mileage, and utilities. Those cost combined were averaging close to $1,700.00 a month. Over the course of a year this adds up to over$20,000.00. That makes a very big difference in the bottom line of any small business. Not to mention the reduction of productive time spent wasted in commuting.
When we began to look at our costs we also started to realize that our client interaction is typically limited to visiting job sites, the client’s office, or meeting at a “third place” like Starbucks, Panera, or Caribou Coffee. “Third place” is defined as a place other than home, which is referred to as “first place,” or office, referred to as “second place.” Due to the comfort, ubiquity and neutral nature of third places they become good places for meetings. The explosion of online collaboration software and WI-FI has helped to make third places more and more popular with easy access to the internet.
This brings us to the third element, technology. Due to technologies such as high speed internet, voice over IP, smart phones, and online collaboration web sites, client and consultant management is easier and more seamless than ever before and not reliant on being in a space with all the proper infrastructure. The technology has created freedom and flexibility. Now, where you are physically sitting is much less relevant than ever before. So, why not sit, work and live where you want and where you are comfortable. That is the question we asked ourselves and this is the result.
We could have easily bought some cheap office desks from the local office supply store and a couple of desk lamps and left it at that, but that would have been lazy and quite frankly no fun. Instead we stepped back and asked what is possible here considering the size of the space and the available budget. The result is not a desk in a room in a house, but is a remarkable workspace. The design creates a space that is functional, comfortable and most importantly worth coming to everyday. If you are not excited about, or worse yet dread coming to where you work than that, to us, is a big problem.
image of completed project
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