We’ve been spending a lot of time in this room in the last year - our home office. Both of us have been working from home since March 2020. While we will probably return to our actual offices at some point, but working in here for such a long time made me reconsider my entire set up. As a result, I upgraded a TON of things so now my home office setup is probably better than the one at the actual office! So come geek out with me - I’m excited to share my tech!
We really enjoy sharing an office when we’re not working. It’s fun to kick back and chill in here together (most of the time we do our own thing). Sharing an office also makes it easier to collaborate when we need to. But as we had experienced in this past year, it’s not ideal when we’re on work calls at the same time. Often, one of us (ok, HB) has to leave the room because the other is too loud… Honestly, I wonder how we all worked together back at the office where it was an open floor plan. Were we just better at tuning each other out?
So in this next house, we’re going to each have our own office. We are incredibly fortunate to be able to do this, and hopefully it’ll make working from home easier. It’s a little sad that we have to break out into our own rooms. We’ll just have find other things to do together and knock on our “coworker’s” door for coffee breaks!
In the meantime, let me show you my setup. This is what my side currently looks like:
I bought a nice new widescreen monitor, a mechanical keyboard, and best of all, built myself a custom PC tower last summer. This thing is a beast - I got pretty much top-of-the-line CPU and graphics cards - so that I can continue to use this bad boy for the next 20 years. I was debating between a custom PC Tower vs a Macbook Pro. In the end, building a tower was waaaay cheaper than the Macbook. And it is a powerful workhorse. Aside from having to code on Windows (boooo), this is the ultimate software engineer’s setup, I think!
The other recent addition is this Biorb aquarium holding my single betta fish. I had wanted an aquarium for a year now and finally pulled the trigger in March. I am super happy with it and love watching my fish throughout the day! It adds a beautiful touch of life and color onto my desk. You can find out more about my Biorb setup in this post.
Next to my desk are my three craft carts that hold craft, fish, and plant supplies (just realized these are my three main hobbies, lol). I used to have a lot more plants in here, but I moved them to areas that got more light in the game room. There is only a single north-facing window, so this room isn’t very bright. But my lone bird’s nest fern seems to be doing just fine.
I did a mass clean-out of our bookshelf earlier this year. I realized that I don’t really read physical books anymore - I read everything on my Kindle. I love the convenience; moreover, I’m trying to pare down on the amount of stuff we have. So this shelf is now a hodge-podge of my remaining book collection (like my Harry Potters), some memory/yearbooks, and HB’s books.
Finally, the map is an awesome engagement gift from our friend Eric. We scratch off countries that we have visited together. Unfortunately, the pandemic happened, so we weren’t able to scratch off New Zealand or Italy last year! Perhaps someday.
Stick around to find out what I envision for my office in our new home! It’ll still have similar colors to what we see here, but I’m excited to also add a touch of drama…
What is a “must-have” in your home office? Mine is my PC tower!
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