Office Space

Last week, after months of looking, I accepted an in-house corporate communications position with a major security company in the Bay Area. Since the beginning of my career in tech PR, security and wireless companies have been the most fascinating for me to work on so when a former client introduced me to a VP at my new company for a new position they were hiring for, I was thrilled. Firstly, because hello ... it's a company people have heard of and respect. And secondly, the job wasn't found by a recruiter, but rather was through a recommendation from someone I had worked for in the past and that meant a lot to me. My experience was spot-on for the position and I'm excited to get started when we get back from Hawaii. Oh, and the other thing? This company bought my absolute favorite client ever last May. Clearly it was meant to be. 

The interesting thing about this position is that I won't need to be in the office everyday. My boss works out of Oregon and my other colleagues aren't in the Bay Area. The majority of my work will be done from home so that means I need to start thinking about my office space. Since moving in we've always had a dedicated office space, but because Alan works from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays it's always been "his" space. This room is our version of a man cave (god how I hate that term). We have one desk and it's very much his domain. When I'm in the office - like I am right now - I'm usually sitting in one of the two leather club chairs we bought in 2009 from his co-worker. I definitely need a dedicated space of my own. Oh, and I think we need to do some organizing and cleaning.

Holy crap our bookshelves are a mess!

It makes the most sense to put my desk either in the window where the chair and side table in the photo above is located, or along the wall immediately to the chair's right, under the frames. Of course, no matter what we decide to do this means that we're going to have to reclaim space that has otherwise been taken over by other furniture or random storage. We have an old, incredibly heavy, filing cabinet in the basement that I'd love to paint white and put casters on. Maybe I can do that when it stops raining and we can file away all of the stuff that's on the floor in the corner to create floor space. Or, if we put my desk in the window, I'll need to find a place in the house for the chairs and the giant palm (we got that when we moved into the loft and it was only 2 feet tall). I'm thinking I could move one of the leather chairs into the corner talked about above and the other into a corner of the dining room where we used to have the pink velvet art deco chair (that now sits in the living room). I'd love to put one in the living room but there's simply no space available as they're too deep to fit into the one available corner.

Obviously, I don't want to spend a lot of money on this as it's not something we were really budgeting for (and since we still have to buy the replacement rugs) so I'm thinking of hitting up Ikea as I actually like some of the work spaces they have available. 

This might be too small for my purposes. I'm not sure in looking at it, but I think so.

I like this one because it has storage where I can hide things out of site. And let's face it, you can tell from the photos above that's needed.

I'm not totally sold on this one ...

Again, more storage ... but open and visible.

I actually really like the look of this one. I dunno though. Maybe not the right kind of extra storage?

So, that's where I'm at. I have three weeks between now and when I start my job so I have time to get set up, but not a ton of it.