January Workspace Update

This post has been long overdue considering that the building work and what’s been shown in this post is three months old already. I want to cover it, as I’m proud of the work that’s been done, and the little bits and pieces that I’ve done.

My workspace is tiny, and I’ve not rushed this job to get moved in. This is because every square inch has to be thought about. I want the space to be as productive and comfortable as possible. There is no point in creating a workspace that is horrible to be sitting in most of the day.

Requirements

Firstly I’ll start with the requirement that I wasn’t able to change which is the space requirements. This couldn’t be changed because I still need the rest of the garage to store the rest of my life. If I tried to get more space I would be conflicting with the family requirements, and I would lose that battle no real point turning up for that. This leaves me with a space of 5ft by 8ft, told you it was tight. But I have to work with what I have.

Next was the requirements I had to give the builder. You thought I had done the construction work here?! I don’t get to use grown-up tools, and I would probably end up in the hospital or burning the house done, this is a detached garage, yep that’s how bad I am.

So told the builder, I wanted to split the garage, with a false roof and a workbench along with extra power. The garage only had a single power outlet and this wasn’t going to work with all the stuff I wanted to throw in here. Also, the workbench needed to span the entire length of the workspace. The bench also had to be split, as we have a spare fridge that we’re going to store in here. Yep, I lost even more space, so much for having a complete space to myself.

The two extra points on the work for the builder, was firstly it had to be cheap because I didn’t want to spend a fortune, who does? And finally, if needed I could take a sledgehammer to the entire thing and have it back to the way it was within a day. The reason for this was home resale, I know adult thinking. The reason for this, some people might back out of a home purchase because of the reduced garage space and whatnot. So I want to easily remove that barrier to sale.

Make Pretty

So once the builder had moved out, that’s where I started working on the space. My main goal here was to get it to a point where I could start moving things in. I wanted to get this done as fast as possible because I’m a child and wanted to get my toys in there and start playing with them.

Now everything has been painted white, it’s boring, this was because of three reasons. Firstly white paint is easily found for different surfaces and purposes, second, it’s cheap and I like cheap for functional things. The space only has a single light in the ceiling and I wanted to make the space as bright as possible without adding additional lights up there, and white does the job.

The other reason for painting all this is because of dust. Garages are dusty, not because they’re not cleaned, but because bricks and concrete generate dust. Now considering that I will be spending most of my time here, and it’s going to have electronics and some of them are sensitive dust is the enemy. So by painting the bricks with masonry paint, I’m sealing the brickwork, therefore it stops the dust from becoming a problem.

Next was the concrete floor. First I sealed the floor with a few coats of thinned-down PVA glue, which means that the micro holes in the ground a filled, and made the surface smoother. Then I finished the floor with a couple of coats of garage concrete floor paint. This was added to the walls and slightly onto the brickwork to form a seal around the edge.

Then there was the ceiling and the fake wall, which are plasterboard, these just got a couple of coats of a cheap white emulsion.

Finally, the desk was painted, firstly to protect the surface, and also just to make it a little bit more presentable. This was just done with some wood paint as that’s well what the desk is made from.

Computer Space

This is where I will be spending most of my time. Not only for my projects, but I work from home, so I’ll be doing my day job here. So it has to work for multiple use cases.

Firstly there is the monitor, this monitor can handle all the inputs that I need for work and play. It’s able to connect my two work laptops, my desktop computer as well as my Pi400. Due to the shallow depth of my desk, I’ve decided to mount the monitor on the wall. It’s always surprising how much space this saves and would recommend it to anyone, even if you have a large area to work already.

The next issue was the shared devices. I don’t want multiple speaks and so on taking up valuable space that I don’t have. So I needed a USB up with an external switch that I could use to switch between the devices. This was resolved with one I picked up on Amazon this means that I’m able to share the speakers, web camera, and microphone between all the machines at the desk. It performs well and switches everything over quickly. The last device that I have plugged into the hub is a powered USB hub that I will have mounted just under the desk at the project space to allow me to easily connect devices to the computer of choice without worrying about power requirements.

The next addition to the computer space was a chair and more importantly the whiteboard. The chair was bought secondhand from a reclaimed office outlet. It was an absolute bargain, and they deliver, it’s local to Harlow so not sure if any use to you. The whiteboard was another purchase from Amazon, and it’s a must for me. I’m a visual person, and when it comes to designing software it’s the fastest method than documents and diagram tools. This image shows how much space I have, as the chair and whiteboard add a sense of scale. Also in the above image, you can see the area that I’ve sectioned off as the project space, where I’ll be working on electronics and printed items.

Project Space

The project space for the workspace is where I will be working on electronics as well as finishing and processing 3D-printed items. I wanted to keep this area separate from the compute space due to doing my day job in the computer area as well, I didn’t want to blur the two purposes. In the image below the 3D printer is also visible, this was always going to the position for it, as it’s accessible while still being out of the way.

The project space is rather simple and is all about simple accessible storage of components. I managed to find a module storage system from printables. So it was just a case of working out what I wanted to get out of the storage solution and then sending the 3D printer to work.

On top of the modular storage system is also another storage solution called Gridfinity created by Zack Freedman. The general idea of Gridfinity is that you have a baseplate, and then storage bins or custom items stack into them. There is an entire specification for Gridfinity, that allows others to create modules for the system and what the requirements are for those to play nicely with others. I’ll do another post on this at some point because it’s an amazing system and can basically solve any storage problem.

I’m sure this space is going to grow and change over time when I start using it in anger. However, this is what I feel that I need at the time of initially creating this space.

Thoughts and Next Steps

This is complete by a long way. I want to add more storage to the workspace. This is going to be done on the walls with the use of some IKEA Skadis peg board. Luckily they provide multiple sizes, which means that I’m able to adapt it to the wall space that I have in various places within the space. Second this system is widely supported by the 3D printing community with various adapters and items that can be printed to provide storage solutions.

Next will be additional lighting in key areas of the workspace, I would like to add a monitor light, a light above the project space, and then there will be lighting within the 3D printer enclosure.

Then there will be adding some personality to the workspace. Currently, the fake wall is just a massive white blank canvas. So I would like to get some items on there, that don’t add too much weight. I’m thinking of some printed pictures, canvas or scrolls. I’m sure that Miku will make an appearance.