Home Office

My wife and I purchased our first and only, now forever home thirty-one years ago. It’s a very modest one-story ranch house, built in 1952 within what at the time was a new subdivision in south Eugene. Looking at it today, you would not suspect it belongs to an architect.

Our house has three bedrooms, one of which has for too long served as a de facto repository for the excess trappings of our bourgeois, middle-class lifestyle: my wife’s hoard of hobby craft supplies, furniture we weren’t using but wouldn’t part with, old computer parts, and many, many volumes from our overflowing collection of books. It was to put it kindly a mess, the one room in our house we effectively had forsaken. COVID-19 changed that. 

I spent my working hours during the first few weeks of our stay-at-home existence firmly planted on our living room couch. My laptop computer literally sat on my lap, less than ideal from an ergonomic standpoint. For the sake of my back and neck, I owed myself a better working arrangement. The solution was to rescue our neglected third bedroom from ignominy and transform it into a decent home office.

The photo above shows the setup today. The desk dates to when we first bought furniture for our new house. We never really used the desk much. Like the rest of the room, it would accumulate a surfeit of stuff that eternally awaited sorting or filing. Now that it has been functionally resurrected, the desk is proving quite serviceable. The chair, on the other hand, enjoyed its best days a long time ago. Both armrests were broken, so I removed them. I need to purchase a new chair because I miss having a place to set my elbows.

At the base of the desk are just a few of the countless boxes containing past issues of my ARCHITECT and Architectural Record magazines; despite cleaning up the space, they continue to occupy a good chunk of the room’s floor area. At the top is a watercolor rendering of my firm’s design for the North Clackamas Aquatic Park (1994), an Oaxacan wood carving acquired during a trip to Mexico many years ago (1985?), and the model of my final design project (an addition to the McMinnville Public Library) prior to graduating from the University of Oregon (1983). 

The windows to the room are at my back as I sit at the desk. This is not ideal, especially because I appear as a silhouette during video teleconferencing without supplemental lighting from the front. The light fixture I use for this purpose is hardly flattering; on video I look ashen and even older than I am. Given the room’s configuration, I cannot reposition the desk to enjoy a view out the windows to our backyard.

The virtual private network (VPN) connection to Robertson/Sherwood/ Architects’ server and my computer in the RSA office functions well, so working remotely hasn’t proven too inconvenient. I ordered a new computer this past week to replace my Lenovo IdeaPad 100S laptop. The old laptop has served me well but is woefully underpowered. Additionally, I plan to replace our Internet router and upgrade the download speed to take full advantage of the VPN connection. 

Despite the cautious reopening of the economy now underway in Oregon, I suspect working from home will continue to be a way of life for a while longer. We will be living with the virus until there is a reliable treatment or prevention, which experts say is many months off. Until my coworkers and I can return to our shared workplace, I am happy to stay safe and work effectively from my new office at home.