My Working From Home Table

As you know I’m a software engineer and since the pandemic situation got to Brazil I`ve been working from home. One of the main problem of that was arranging my (home) office, at first it felt like an adventure to me because every table in the house looked like a potential office. I had a notebook, 2 extra monitors, wireless keyboard and mouse to setup my working table, I also needed a space to have some annotations, and charge my phone.

The Kitchen

The kitchen table was great, the height, space and lightning looked nice until I had to eat, to do that I needed to either move my setup or eat somewhere else, it was a no go. After that I tried to move to a picnic like table in a covered but open area behind the house (the barbecue space), a big table with wide benches near the grass with a beautiful view to the sky (which is where I wrote this).

The BBQ Table

I live in the south region of Brazil in a city that sits on the south hemisphere tropical line called Tropic of Capricorn which defines that everything above this line until the northern hemisphere tropical line (the Tropic of Cancer) are the tropical area of the planet. So this means that we have pretty nice weather to stay outside most of the year. I’m writing this in the morning (6am) of a late summer and it makes comfortables 21°C outside. the winter is not severe but in the summer near midday it became hot enough to make you want to go inside a room with air-conditioning, after that near 3pm, the sun hits this table making it hard to see the screen, besides that, where I would left my setup when I wanted do have a nice barbecue? No go again.

The Living Room

The idea was not moving all the stuff (monitors, mouse, keyboard) all the time, if I wanted I could take my notebook and work somewhere else for some time, but the rest of the things must not be moved so much, because it takes time to do that. So I came with the brilliant idea to take a bendable round table to the living room and work from there (ignore the blue screen).

It was good for some time (a week tops), but the table wasn’t comfortable enough and been on the middle of the living room didn’t made my wife any happier. The pandemic situation was telling me that it would take a long time before we could go back to the office and I was kind liking working from home with my dog and wife (that works from home too), so I decided to make a definitive (home) office to myself. Yeee!

My home office

We have a guest room with a bed, wardrobe and a perfect space for a “L” shaped 1.5m table that I bought online. So even that I was making my office in this room I could use it as guest room too, because I left the bed and the wardrobe on its place. In this room I already had a ceiling fan and an air-conditioner (hot and cold) so I wouldn’t had to spend any extra money on that. After almost a year in it I can tell that most of the days the ceiling fan is enough to make the room comfortable which makes me save on the electrical bill.

It felt great to work from this room because it’s very silent and with that window I could rest my eye looking outside and get some fresh air. It was good, but needed to be better so I made some upgrades that I will tell you on part 2…

Tell me, on the comments, what you think about it and what would you do different from me.