Making Space for a Home Office

As many of you know, I work from home as a Freelance Writer and Library Consultant (check out my webpage: http://www.juliedietzelglair.com/ - shameless self promotion done). For the past two years, this has been my office.

I'm ashamed to say that it almost always looked like that (however, they say that a messy desk is a sign of genius). It simply isn't conducive to organizational possibilities. It also became our dumping ground. So, for the past two years we have tossed around a multitude of home office ideas. The biggest ones being:

• Renovate the dinette into a cubicle-type office.
• Remove the loveseat and install a desk.

Renovating the dinette always seemed like the better option. We hardly use the dinette in the warmer months, opting instead to eat at the helm station table or on the pier (why be inside?).

The loveseat provides extra seating in the salon and also pulls out into a single sleeper giving us more space for guests. In all honesty, we've only had six people sleep on board twice since we bought the boat. Does it really make sense to keep a sleeper sofa for a once-a-year need?

Yet, the idea of a full blown reno scared us both a bit. There is already limited space onboard and a reno would take up space. We also have fear of making drastic changes no matter how much we love our floating home. So, we just continued with the status quo. I would clear off space as I needed it or just sit on the sofa and work.

Everything changed on a serendipitous trip to Office Depot. I found a desk that would fit and was extremely reasonably priced. If we could get the loveseat out and store it there would be no fear of drastic change.

Doug got to work taking the loveseat apart. Our biggest challenge was fitting the frame out the salon door. That is the frame sitting outside the salon door: it barely, and I mean barely, fit.

But once everything was out and the floor vacuumed we were ready to move ahead with Project Home Office. Just look at all this beautiful empty floor space!

We now have a useable desk:

I'm still working on figuring out the right seating for it. I don't want a large overbearing desk chair and the bar stool isn't the right height.

We also still have lots of salon seating on the starboard side:

Plus, the dinette is useable again (just in time for it to be ignored all summer).

In this age of technology, even if you don't work from home there are certain computer related needs on board. How do you manage your onboard "office?"