This year in SOHO

For 2017 my spring-cleaning routine inspires dreams of chucking my entire workspace and starting over from scratch. Cleaning? I prefer demolition.

This time around I’m starting to scratch out a clean-sheet approach to SOHO (Small Office, Home Office) design. So, for my fellow SOHO’ers on Saipan and elsewhere, I’ll share some of my thoughts. And, as always, you can always email me some of yours.

As for the easy side of the equation, a typical office will, of course, have bookshelves, file cabinets, and office supplies. Nothing says that we have to keep all of this stuff in our small office, though. We can stage things as necessary.

Next we ponder the chair and desk. I’ll note a positive trend on the chair note: Among manufacturers there seems to be wider appreciation for the merits of good ergonomics. After all, our working days add up to working decades. Our backs and necks are eventually going to answer to our behavior.

Most of my office time is spent reading books. This is surely easier on the body than computers are. Still, just to be safe, I bought a comfortable desk chair for under $200. It’s adjustable in so many dimensions that you’d need a string theory expert at MIT to count them all. I don’t want to sound like a hectoring geezer, but, yeah, a decent chair is worth it.

One of my friends went Full Goober on the gig and bought a $1,100 office chair to stave off backaches. If I ever have so much as a hint of desk-induced back pain, I’ll be going Full Goober as well.

Well, so far, so simple, but I have realized that much of the SOHO realm involves what I’ll call flat space. This can be tricky.

A desk is the most obvious example of a flat space. It’s what comes to mind when we think of an office. But a desk isn’t the last word. It’s just the first word.

A desk is a lousy place to park appliances such as printers, fax machines, scanners, copiers, binding machines, hole punches, routers, and so on. This stuff really needs its own territory. I found myself accumulating this equipment piece by piece, which makes sense, but finding space for it on a piece-by-piece basis winds up making less sense.

The best solution I can come up for appliances is a long surface that runs along a wall. Even for a very small office, a seven-foot run isn’t overkill.

This leads me to my third type of flat space, which I’ll call assembly space. This is where we collate documents and do similar pull-a-project-together stuff. Having a dedicated surface keeps these tasks from intruding on desk space. Before I ponder this any further, I have to mention a SOHO element that we haven’t yet considered.

That element is visitors.

Are we entertaining clients? Even if we’re not, we’ll probably be hosting collaborators at some point. An office as a one-person sheath is a lot different than an office that has room for more than one person.

One of the best solutions I’ve seen is to have a small conference table that seats, say, six people. The good news is that when guests aren’t present the table can do double-duty as the assembly space I mentioned. Unfortunately, a six-person table, with generous enough wall clearance to keep people from feeling pinned down, might require more space than a SOHO can provide.

What then? Well, we can always go junior-executive style and put a couple of office chairs opposite the working side of the desk. No, I don’t like this arrangement. Yes, I have used it.

Space permitting, we can split the difference by having a sitting area with, say, a couple of armchairs and a low table. True, this table isn’t going to work very well for the assembly space I mentioned, but it’s better than nothing. Overall, this arrangement is probably better than the junior-executive approach. I intend to use the armchair-and-low-table arrangement the next time I’m putting together a SOHO.

As I fit these elements together I’ll note that the long surface for appliances seems simple at first glance, but it can claim a lot of wall space. Unlike a bookshelf, it provides very little vertical latitude for the presentation of its elements. People will reach up, or down, to grab a book. But to use a fax machine? Nope. To use a copier? Nope again. I’m no interior decorator, but, for my utilitarian outlook, the wall space above this surface can be reclaimed by hanging photos or other stuff that you wanted to display.

I’m still closing in on my ideal SOHO design. I don’t yet know how much space it will require. What I do know is that there’s no substitute for experience. The decades I’ve spent using SOHO space have taught me things I never would have considered up front. Ah, such is the road to demolition.