Hofelution — Home Office Evolution
Yes, I know — very badly combined…
Some people have expressed interested in my home office setup, so I thought, let’s put together some pictures. Well, while checking all the photos from my home office setups, I recognized how much it evolved over time, so maybe it’s worth writing a bit more about it.
Let me start by saying: My very first home office setup was 20 years ago and I don’t have any pictures from back then; Anyway, what I want to concentrate on is anyway the journey of my home office, while working partially remotely until I ended working only remotely.
I have to admit, that we can be grateful that we have a large flat and my home office therefore moved already 3 times. And these days, we do have 2 home offices — one for me and one for my wife.
It started with a very simple setup in our anteroom; Not really separated, but during the day, I was mostly alone at home, hence this didn’t really pose a huge issue.
During the pandemic I had the need to enhance the setup — but it really was only the first step.
But the next step was a real challenge. We had around 50m² (~540 square feet) that we didn’t use; At the time we bought this flat, it was a raw attic, but (more or less) at the same level of the rest of the flat. Anyway, it was time to take care of this space. Heating, thermal insulation, flooring, replacing the leaking roof window and the door to the loggia.
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A few pictures of the renovation; Apologies, but we’re really proud of what we made out of that room!
As you can imagine, at this point I was super keen to move over; I knew moving the whole setup is going to take a bit longer, but I really wanted to start using my new office and I already had my new stand/sit table…
On the same day I moved the rest, after finishing my work day, but the cable management wasn’t something I focused on, but I had some wood left that I used to hang up my Red Hat flag :-)
Thanks to my wonderful wife, I cleaned this up at least a little bit.
Unfortunately, I’m missing “documentation” of my move from this setup to my new setup, when I switched my job from working for Red Hat to GitLab. We also shuffled around the rooms a bit — with kids growing up. Not the very first version of my new office, but as you can see, I updated the cable management, light, monitors; And the AC in the upper left corner wasn’t installed right from the beginning.
What is missing here is a view on the wall behind me. Zoom does pretty well with green screens, so I decided to paint the wall green and I can tell you: This is working so well. The newest evolution is my new table top, because I wanted something slightly bigger and wooden, instead of the artificial one I had previously. On the next photo you can see the new table top, but also the green wall:
And here with most of the equipment in place again:
I still had my Nikon DSLR camera that I also wanted to use — mainly for recordings (instead of synchronous meetings), but for that purpose I didn’t want to go with a virtual background; Hence requires a different setup. Don’t get me wrong, my Elgato Facecam Pro does an awesome job and I don’t regret switching to Elgato, but a DSLR is a DSLR — full stop. But standing there in front of the camera, I also need a way to look at a presentation or the notes. One option would have been a teleprompter and I’m very tempted to get one, but I decided for a cheap projector that’s projecting the presentation or notes right over the DSLR. See the next image:
And this is the view from the other side, but now also enhanced with wall cushion — for a nicer background and also improve acoustics.
So, what’s next? I’m not going to stop optimizing. I’m looking for better storage solutions currently. Potentially replacing the small ones with a larger ones underneath the camera, where I’ve put together two (yes, Ikea) tables for the moment.
The journey continues. Do you have any great stories to share about your home office setups or the hofelution. Share your thoughts, stories, journeys and maybe you have a better word than I came up with?
