Designing a Home Office

[mindfold]

As some of you have experienced, I have been working home since March. I am currently posted up in our spare room. My oldest will be taking over this room shortly. He needs his own study area.

That leaves me to build out my basement for my office. I foresee me working from home majority of the time even after COVID. I already have the area framed out along with the rest of the basement. Kitchenette,entertainment area and an ?executive? bathroom will all be part of additional space added.

Any suggestions on building my home office? I will have enough power outlets and telecom lines run to needed areas. Some concerns are with future video conferencing. Lighting and sound needs to name a few. Just use plug and play stuff?

Any sound dampening suggestions? I will be installing it in the ceiling to kill heavy walkers and prevent the surround sound from going upstairs.
Don?t see a need to install in walls. I could be wrong.

Maybe I?m over thinking it but I tend to be the type of, ?while I am here might as well add it now?.


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[20X11]

Sound batting inside the walls would be mandatory for me, along with a solid core door.

[gnihcraes]

Always put insulation or sound deadening in interior walls. Such an improvement. (My experience anyways.

Insulated all walls of my sons basement room and have enjoyed the peace since. :)

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[thedave1164]

I got some cubical walls on CL for free, works great and I can change it up if I get froggy.

Over 3 years now and I have not changed it up

[Delfuego]

Pre-wire CAT6. Move your network gear downstairs as a pseudo network-room DMARC if possible. Buy good office grade network gear (don't skimp) not residential gear. Upgrade your ISP bandwidth and get a failover ISP if yours goes down often. Same dance we do for small offices. If you get frequent power outages, get UPS batteries. If your expected to be "always on", your gear needs to be too.

I wouldn't worry about sound and video too much, everyone has kids/dogs/etc at home and are pretty forgiving. I however don't do presentations or video conferencing if I can avoid it.

With better network gear, you can control kids internet access, availability, bandwidth and have content filtering too.

Good luck!

[Little Dutch]

No real advice on the office, But I know more about KVM switches and video (monitor) cables than I ever wanted to. I finally got my dual monitor, two computer, single mouse keyboard, and single headset working yesterday.

I went with the iogear gcs1642 kvmp switch. Display port doesn’t play well for dual monitors, so I had to abandon my docking station and use the dsub and hdmi out ports on the laptop itself. You need a powered converter box if you want to go from vga to dvi, and it wasn’t worth it to me just to keep the dock. But display port and dvi wouldn’t work side by side. Maybe Onboard intel graphics cards are garbage, maybe it’s a limitation of the display port, I didn’t check because it didn’t matter in the end. But it runs both the dsub and hdmi ports with no issues.

Hdmi to dvi, dvi to hdmi, and dsub to dvi adapters all work just fine.

[Delfuego]

I finally got my dual monitor, two computer, single mouse keyboard, and single headset working yesterday. You know you could have gotten +90% of this achieved with Windows 10 Pro RDP and zero dollars, right?

[Irving]

Another +1 for insulation in the walls and ceiling. Friends were considering having sound proof doors installed when they had their house built, but not sure if they ever pulled the trigger. Just mentioning to acknowledge that they exist.

[Grant H.]

You know you could have gotten +90% of this achieved with Windows 10 Pro RDP and zero dollars, right?

If he doesn't have pro, it's not zero dollars...

[Mazin]

Pre-wire CAT6. Move your network gear downstairs as a pseudo network-room DMARC if possible. Buy good office grade network gear (don't skimp) not residential gear. Upgrade your ISP bandwidth and get a failover ISP if yours goes down often. Same dance we do for small offices. If you get frequent power outages, get UPS batteries. If your expected to be "always on", your gear needs to be too.

I wouldn't worry about sound and video too much, everyone has kids/dogs/etc at home and are pretty forgiving. I however don't do presentations or video conferencing if I can avoid it.

With better network gear, you can control kids internet access, availability, bandwidth and have content filtering too.

Good luck!


^this except I would use CAT8, Might as well upgrade to the 8 now while your doing it. I have everything in cat 8 now with the gig package from comcast and I love my network speeds.

[Mtneer]

If you'll be spending time on video calls, design a good lighting and sound system. Some easy, inexpensive additions can greatly improve your professional look.

For the main light, use a 10" ring light made for cell phones but place it at eye level off to the side at about 2 or 10 o'clock if the camera is at 12. Then have a small LED panel on the opposite side, dialed down to 50%. For an extra touch, place another LED panel at 5 o'clock (if ring is at 2) but about 2 feet higher aimed at the back of your head and dialed up to 200% (bigger panel). If you have a good background, a fourth light on that might be nice but can also be distracting; avoid a busy background that will distract viewers.

For sound, use any standalone mic. One sitting on your desk will sound way better than whatever is built in to the computer or camera. Agree with others about adding insulation inside walls and ceiling while you have the chance. Also consider that bare walls in an empty room tend to be echoey so adding furniture and stuff can help.

[def90]

Wet bar, kegerator, wine cellar, nice comfy lazy boy, cigar exhaust fan, 75 inch TV.. Let's face it, this will end up becoming the man cave anyway.

[ray1970]

Wet bar, kegerator, wine cellar, nice comfy lazy boy, cigar exhaust fan, 75 inch TV.. Let's face it, this will end up becoming the man cave anyway.

Like.

[Little Dutch]

You know you could have gotten +90% of this achieved with Windows 10 Pro RDP and zero dollars, right?

If only.

[Little Dutch]

If he doesn't have pro, it's not zero dollars...

Ive got an msdn, so no problems there. The point was/is to keep my home stuff completely separate from my work stuff, but still use the same peripherals.

Zero chance I'll be accessing my stuff with hardware that is owned by the company.

[Irving]

Allocate as much square footage for your home office as possible, for tax reasons. The entertainment area can be the waiting room, and the kitchenette can be the break room.

[Gman]

If he doesn't have pro, it's not zero dollars...
If you know someone that can give you a friends and family discount invite to the Microsoft Store, it's $35.

I had a TechNet subscription when that was a thing. As a result, I have 10 retail license keys for Windows 7 Ultimate. Those keys are valid for a free Windows 10 Pro upgrade.

ETA: I totally get wanting to keep what's yours and what's for business separate.

[Mazin]

https://brytesoft.com/windows-10-pro.html

I have this on 5 machines, this is limited to the machine only but for sub $40 you can't beat it

[bradbn4]

I went with a 32" 4k display; set of good external speakers along with a nice mic for conference calls.
Also keep a nice electric tea kettle when I want to change from coffee to tea or hot cocoa.

Good lighting helps, and I find a NAS useful on a secondary computer so I can play tunes and use it for training video's.

I maintain backup copies of my work on a office approved external drive so I don't have to worry about lag time on the network for backups.

[bradbn4]

The last must have upgrade I did for my basement work area was to add a quality office chair. It makes all the difference.
My budget did not allow for the premium brand, but I did find a nice LazyBoy brand one at Sam's club that works well.

Two additional minor upgrades were a sonic humidify along with a foam pad mat to keep my feet warmer.

If your work area is cold like a basement; maybe a room heater to take the chill off would be productive.

[Grant H.]

Ive got an msdn, so no problems there. The point was/is to keep my home stuff completely separate from my work stuff, but still use the same peripherals.

Zero chance I'll be accessing my stuff with hardware that is owned by the company.

That's fair. I wouldn't want corp assets having access to my personal gear either.