by Ted Sherman

Created on: February 05, 2008

Our office-at-home project brought a whole new meaning to the term: coming out of the closet. We had a triangular-shaped little room under our staircase that led from the first floor hallway up to our upstairs bedrooms. The people who owned the home before us used it as a utility storage area, primarily for the vacuum sweeper and cleaning supplies. When we first moved in, we did the same, adding buckets of paint and brushes for the weeks it took us to repaint much of the interior of the house.

On moving day, I dragged all of my computer equipment up the stairs to our bedroom. Since I'm a freelance writer, I was always thumping away at the iMac, while spread out on a nearby table were also my scanner, printer, lamp and plug-in boxes for internet and other junk. This didn't bother my spouse when I did it during what used to be called working hours. However, when I needed to complete a project with a tight deadline, my typing, scanning, printing and grumbling at 2 am was more than a wee bit bothersome. Further, even when I wasn't actually working at it, the computer was always on, and it often glowed and beeped at all hours to let me know I was getting mail and some of those unwanted spoken and musical spam messages.

At some family discussions, I volunteered to haul the computer equipment to another area, such as the seldom-used dining or living room. That met with heavy resistance from the rest of the family, considering my penchant for leaving my work area in a spread-out mess. It was suggested that I take my office equipment down to the basement, where there was lots of room. However, the area wasn't finished, was cold and clammy all year round, and would've cost at least $2,500 to wall out, put down floor tiles, insulate and heat an office in that unattractive dungeon.

Several afternoons later, as I was, as usual, in our bedroom punching away at the computer, I heard our kids with several friends playing around on the first floor. I'm usually immune from such noise, but I when I heard a lot of banging along with the yelling, I went downstairs to try to quiet the riot. I found the kids playing some kind of attack the fort, with the defenders stationed inside the little room beneath the stairs. The door slammed open and shut as the kids fought with brooms and mops. When I told them to cool the noise a bit, I noticed that four of the kids, the castle defenders, easily fit into the little room. Thus was born the idea.

After clearing out all the cleaning materials and putting them in the basement, I went to work with a paint brush, added some electrical outlets and put up several levels of wall shelves. With the help of a neighbor's band saw, I cut out a section of the door and replaced it with movable louvers. This gave me air circulation for when I wanted to work with the door closed. I also installed a lock on the door to assure that no one could use the computer without my permission. This was before skinny little laptops hit the market. Within a year of two, we had three of them, one for each child and one for my spouse. After that, I didn't need the lock on the door of my little office.

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