I haven’t posted at all since the pandemic began. Like most of us, I have complicated feelings about many things. However, I’ll jump back in with something lighter: how I’ve adapted my physical workspace to our new life.
I used to have exclusive domain over my home office. This didn’t always feel like a blessing, as the office often got messier than the rest of the house. I tended to it last because it was “my room.” Common spaces took priority. But at the end of the day I alone worked there, and that meant something.
In March, school shut down. My husband’s office shut down. Overnight, my one-person office turned into a three-person office.
It’s going to remain so for a while. Baltimore City schools announced this week they will start the school year virtually. Even if children return to physical classrooms before the end of 2020, I don’t know if mine will. My husband’s employer made him fully remote until at least 2021. We all need to work from home productively — together — for the foreseeable future.
Office layout: Before
These developments drew my attention to my office floor plan, which mattered little in the Before Times. I could use my desk, couch, and most of the bookshelf. What else mattered?
My husband and kiddo technically had desks in there, but not really. I’d evicted my husband years ago for keeping an incurably messy work area he hardly used. Then I repurposed his desk for my printer, scanner, and label maker. My kid would set up projects on the floor wherever he happened to be in the house.
When the two of them moved back in, long-standing problems became more glaring:
- All three desks were clustered into a single corner, giving no sense of privacy or isolation
- A tray table by the couch quickly became a clutter magnet (my guys both pile stuff on any horizontal surface they can find)
- The electric piano in front of the bookshelf made it hard to access the bottom shelves, yes, but it also made regular dusting and vacuuming feel cumbersome
The desk cluster posed the biggest concern. I was used to working alone. My family didn’t actively distract me all the time, but our level of physical coziness cramped my creative work. I also wanted to separate my husband and kiddo to prevent them from distracting each other during the day. We had an entire room to work with. It seemed silly to cram our desks up against each other in a single corner.
Office layout: The perfect plan
Around when school wrapped up in June, I got restless. At this point, I’d seen very little beyond our house for the past three months. I downloaded a floor plan app and played with new layouts for almost every room in our house.
After many iterations, I found the perfect office layout. It moved each of our desks onto its own wall, giving three discrete work zones. Within those areas, we had not only our desks but accessories we’d previously been separated from: my husband’s piano, my file cabinet. The bookshelf and couch moved to a common area in one corner of the room. It was the ultimate separation of concerns.
(Well, not exactly perfect)
Lest you think I could use a beloved software engineering phrase like “separation of concerns” to sell my husband on the new layout, let me share the flip side of my perfect-plan coin.
My plan required almost every piece of furniture in the room to move, including my husband’s huge, heavy desk. It also failed to account for the location of power outlets, network hardware, or south-facing windows that would put a ton of glare on computer screens.
No, my husband said. This is too much work with too many logistical issues.
But sometimes we have the perfect team
And lest you think my husband is just the person in my life who pooh-poohs all my plans, well, not exactly. Yes, he very often does pooh-pooh my plans. He discourages me from starting on projects he thinks will require more complexity, more effort, and more disruption than I’ve anticipated. He’s usually right.
But I’m stubborn, with the lion’s share of our family’s physical endurance, and once I latch onto the idea of starting something I often cannot resist the temptation to dig in. This can lead me to act brashly, even irresponsibly. At the same time, I contribute a necessary get-started energy to our household. I counteract my husband’s perfectionism and inertia to ensure the important projects get done eventually.
However, we really shine when I take the first rough swings at a project, then allow him to move in and refine it for efficiency and polish. He never would’ve bothered to create a new floor plan — and strongly encouraged me not to, either — but once I proposed one, the gears started turning.
He sat down with the iPad and started iterating on my layout. I suspect he has a better working memory than I do, more able to consider multiple angles — e.g. not just who uses a piece of furniture, but what wires connect to it — and he certainly possesses superior spatial reasoning skills. He saw things I didn’t.
Soon, he came up with a new plan. This one kept all the cabling to one side of the room and only required one heavy piece of furniture — my desk — to move instead of three.
Office layout: After
We accomplished most of what I wanted. My husband and I are now separated at opposite ends of the room with our backs to each other. This makes our workspaces feel much more private. I’ve been able to get a lot more of my deeper thought work done. Our kid’s desk still adjoins his, but he said that’s okay with him, especially if it prevents a lot of high-impact furniture reshuffling.
I still have my desk-couch combo, which I love. I sit on the couch when reading or chatting with my husband. My kiddo has spent long hours reading a book or doing work on the iPad there. He likes the proximity to me, and it works well to have us in our own section of the room.
My husband also has his own little work nook, complete with the piano, which he can now easily hook up to his computer. He has yet to take advantage of this, but I’m hopeful!
Little changes can make a big difference
It might seem like a minor change, especially considering the size of the room. However, I made the right choice pushing to rearrange the office. The pandemic and its effects are here for the long haul. Even after we clean up the unconscionable mess that is our national response to the virus, I have to wonder if my husband’s employer will want to pay rent for him to return to a physical office. At the very least, he’ll probably continue to work from home somewhat regularly. As my kiddo gets older, he’ll have more at-the-desk projects. My office has probably transformed permanently into our office.
I’m curious how others have handled shifts to more at-home work. Those of us who already worked at home experienced as much disruption and transition as those around us. We were unaccustomed to working in a shared office or supervising our kids’ online classwork during our productive time. If you had to reconfigure your space during the pandemic, drop me a note in the comments. I love to hear about how and where people work!
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