Giving up my office & creating a new workspace

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Back in 2017, when the world wasn’t quite such a terrifying place, I spent weeks converting the spare room into my perfect little home office, complete with a daybed for guests & everything I needed to work.

Fast forward three years and that cosy little office is no longer mine. James has been working from home since the day after Boris announced “we need people to start working from home where they possibly can” back in March. Recently, the government & their tame scientific experts have been doing a bit of an ‘in, out, in, out, shake it all about’ approach to whether workers should be back in the office, but James’s work have decided to continue with WFH for the foreseeable future.

With the kids home from school for months, it made sense for James to shut himself away in the office to work, while I handled the homeschooling side of things. I’m not going to lie, it was a difficult spring & summer. One of the main reasons I am self-employed is that it gives me the flexibility to work around my health issues. Having the children home 100% of the time and not being able to take the time to rest in the dark & quiet, in addition to the higher stress levels a pandemic inevitably inspires, made it tough.

We are aware that it was fortunate that we have such a great space available in the house for James to WFH; after all, it’s not like I could do many hours while dealing with the kids, and so that’s just what happened. I made the decision to scale back the amount I was doing massively; both with my work and with this blog. A lot of my clients couldn’t afford me anyway, even with a discount I had in place over the summer, and I hated trying to share my office with James. I like things ‘just so’ when I sit down to work, and he has made a right mess of it!

Now though, the kids are back at school and I had been getting antsy to increase my hours again. I was starting to get more enquiries from clients and having to turn down or postpone work. With James continuing to work from home and needing the quiet solitude of the office in the afternoons once the girls were home, it became obvious that I needed my own workspace downstairs again. My work computer was a desktop machine (my Hackintosh, a few upgrades later) and James was using my monitor for his work, so it wasn’t like I could just sit downstairs with a laptop.

The shift to remote work forced many households to rethink how they use their living space, especially when multiple family members needed a dedicated area to work productively. Creating a functional workspace at home often involves balancing professional needs with family life, storage, and everyday routines. As remote and flexible working arrangements continue to evolve, many people turn to resources such as Jooble when exploring opportunities that can fit around a home-based lifestyle.

We did what every English person with a low budget for furniture does when they need to switch their rooms around; we turned to Ikea. At the start of September, we drove down to Bristol to fill up the car with boxes and boxes of furniture, and I spent an entire Sunday putting it all together.

Let this be a lesson to you; always check online what stock they have in store; because I had been keeping an eagle eye on stock levels, we avoided queuing at our local Birmingham store only to be disappointed. Yes, we had to take a bit of a long drive down to Bristol instead, but as the girls were with James’s Mum it wasn’t an unpleasant way to spend a child-free day after months of lockdown!

After much planning with their online Kallax building tools, and my iPad & Pencil, I had settled on a 5×5 Kallax unit with some cupboard, drawers, and glass shelf inserts, along with a Linmonn desk which clamps onto the unit on one end, and has simple legs on the other. We picked up some other bits & pieces like a bamboo monitor riser and a new (fairly comfortable) desk chair, and some storage boxes & baskets for the kids’ toys.

In addition to my work area, I had to take into account the fact we were taking down a number of shelves we used to display lego and removing some smaller Kallax units (happily, I’ve made space for these under the stairs, improving the storage situation going on there). Any new plan I had for this end of the living room had to include toy storage, and somewhere for our lego collection.

Of course, things do not always go smoothly. Once we had everything set up, and James had retrieved monitors from his work to replace the one I was reclaiming, my computer threw a hissy fit and I got fed up trying to sort it out.

We’ve been using it as a gaming PC in Windows mode as well as my work computer with MacOS, but the Mac side of things was becoming unstable – especially after the WiFi & Bluetooth chip failed – and I couldn’t be faffed to set it up again from a blank slate, which is pretty much what I would have had to do. Instead, we invested in a new Mac mini for me to use, which we’ve been thinking about getting for a while anyway.

We took some of my hard drives out of the PC case and put them into enclosures to use as external drives for the Mac, and then using a USB switcher I am able to share my keyboard, mouse, and USB hub between the two machines. I’ve got the Mac hooked up to my 4K monitor via HDMI and the PC with Display Port, so to switch between the two computers I just have to hit a few buttons. The speakers are wired up to the monitor, so they also work for both machines. It’s certainly made life a lot easier!

The Mac mini is so small it easily fits underneath my monitor riser, along with the two hard drives and the USB gadget. I’ve taken to curling up in the swivel armchair next to my desk with my monitor turned around, and a Bluetooth controller hooked up, to enjoy some gaming time in the evenings.

Although it’s not quite as nice as having my very own office, I’m pleased with what I’ve done to carve out a little space for me in the living room, whilst not sacrificing toy storage or anything else for the kids. I’m tucked away in the corner of the room, leaving plenty of space for the kids to play. It also prompted us to have a big sort out of toys and games, which is always a good idea!