Office Space

January 12, 2010 | Filed Under Main | Leave a Comment

Here is the key to trying to set up your own home office – organization. This can be a rather large issue, especially if the only room at your disposal is the one that holds half your clothes, all the CDs and most of the books in the house… AND has been used for “sweep-and-clear” for the past two years.

First – repatriate all the “sweep-and-clear” items and the DVD boxes for the movies you took overseas. That wasn’t so bad. Then – remove all the old clothes that you haven’t worn in two years so you have room for the desert wardrobe. This is what garbage bags are for. Bring them to the thrift or leave them on the curb.

Now you need organizational furniture. In my case, it was a bookshelf (left over from the Ikea nightmare from last September), a new filing cabinet (to replace various stray boxes all over the room), a set of shelves for the bathroom (with a 20-year old in the house, there was NO room for my products) and finally a shoe organizer. I had shoes home and I had desert shoes. Together they are impressive… and not in a good way. Organizational furniture can be acquired fairly cheaply from either Staples, Ikea, Target or even Bed, Bath and Bananas (they have ALL kinds of little doo-dads you never even dreamed of needing!).

And since these items are made in foreign countries for foreign countries, your only guide to building and creating your furniture are the “mime instructions”. You all have seen mime instructions. There are no words – only pictures and hand signals. A facsimile of a tool of some kind with a plus sign and an arrow that points to a letter on a vague picture of a piece of wood. It’s like playing that old game “Concentration” or reading the cap off a Haffenreffer bottle. Mime instructions are a universal language, sort of like making a check sign in a restaurant. Only in a restaurant you don’t run the risk of seventy pounds of pressed board falling on your head if you do it wrong. I am in the middle of my mime instructions for the filing cabinet. It has many pieces, a number of moving parts, a palette of screws and dowels and only three pages of instructions. Three. I completed page one yesterday. The rest should be done by the end of the week… with the prerequisite cursing and yelling.

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