Space.. the final frontier.

Well… not quite. But it’s really important to me. I value space, both personal and physical. I have lived in a bunch of different houses and apartments over the last decade, and I never really felt I had enough space. Laptops were sat in the living room, kitchen table or wherever was the least noisy place in the house. Raspberry Pis were scattered in drawers and gathered dust at the back of a desk, PCs were left whirring in bedrooms… we all know the frustration.

When my girlfriend and I bought our first place together, one of the most important things for me was a place to put the technology, with enough space for me to tinker with various projects.

We got the house from a couple with two young girls, as we don’t have any kids (yet) we didn’t need a huge amount of rooms, one for guests (Georgia’s pet project) and one for me to put laptops, desktops, xbox, raspberry pis, important documents… everything.

It started off a pink, fairly grimy room, and with a few days of work, it’s become my favorite room in the house. My ‘office’.

Technology has become such a fundamental part of all our lives, and it’s still frequently confined to a secondary status in a lot of our homes. If we ever need an extra bedroom, I am now comfortable enough to say “Ok, time to move house” as opposed to giving up the office and having bits of tech scattered about the place. My iMac runs 24/7 as both my main PC and our home media server. The Xbox and 32″ TV gives me a place I can come and watch a movie or play xbox with my friends with out taking over the main TV in the living room, or escape when programs about baking/dancing or wedding dresses are on. I also don’t feel like I’m being relegated to some damp cold corner of the house we currently aren’t using, I’m in the office.

The desks were made with the IKEA room builder, which is a fantastic piece of software

It also prints off a list of everything you need, prices it, and can be ordered in the correct way so you can pick up all the bits in the store without going back on yourself. All in all the office in my pic came to £220 plus about £50 on a good set of paint. A tiny investment for a great creative space.

I now have all the space I could want, all the house’s tech is tucked away out of site, I have somewhere to escape to and my (much) better half has somewhere to work when she is studying.

You spend thousands of pounds on all your tech, invest a bit of space in it too.. a dedicated office allows you to feel much more creative, isolates you from distractions found in every other room (dogs barking, washing machines running, TV blaring away etc), it also means I can setup my work laptop, a nice monitor and work away without having to shove everything off to the side and feel like I’m typing on my knee, the freedom to work from home, and actually feel like I can properly work makes life much easier.

I’m not saying kick the child out into the porch, but if you have some spare space, or could make some, consider creating your own tech room/office where you are free from distractions and can really get creative.