Designing a Home Office

[mindfold]

As some of you have experienced, I have been working home since March. I am currently posted up in our spare room. My oldest will be taking over this room shortly. He needs his own study area.

That leaves me to build out my basement for my office. I foresee me working from home majority of the time even after COVID. I already have the area framed out along with the rest of the basement. Kitchenette,entertainment area and an ?executive? bathroom will all be part of additional space added.

Any suggestions on building my home office? I will have enough power outlets and telecom lines run to needed areas. Some concerns are with future video conferencing. Lighting and sound needs to name a few. Just use plug and play stuff?

Any sound dampening suggestions? I will be installing it in the ceiling to kill heavy walkers and prevent the surround sound from going upstairs.
Don?t see a need to install in walls. I could be wrong.

Maybe I?m over thinking it but I tend to be the type of, ?while I am here might as well add it now?.


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[20X11]

Sound batting inside the walls would be mandatory for me, along with a solid core door.

[gnihcraes]

Always put insulation or sound deadening in interior walls. Such an improvement. (My experience anyways.

Insulated all walls of my sons basement room and have enjoyed the peace since.

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[thedave1164]

I got some cubical walls on CL for free, works great and I can change it up if I get froggy.

Over 3 years now and I have not changed it up

[Delfuego]

Pre-wire CAT6. Move your network gear downstairs as a pseudo network-room DMARC if possible. Buy good office grade network gear (don't skimp) not residential gear. Upgrade your ISP bandwidth and get a failover ISP if yours goes down often. Same dance we do for small offices. If you get frequent power outages, get UPS batteries. If your expected to be "always on", your gear needs to be too.

I wouldn't worry about sound and video too much, everyone has kids/dogs/etc at home and are pretty forgiving. I however don't do presentations or video conferencing if I can avoid it.

With better network gear, you can control kids internet access, availability, bandwidth and have content filtering too.

Good luck!

[Little Dutch]

No real advice on the office, But I know more about KVM switches and video (monitor) cables than I ever wanted to. I finally got my dual monitor, two computer, single mouse keyboard, and single headset working yesterday.

I went with the iogear gcs1642 kvmp switch. Display port doesn’t play well for dual monitors, so I had to abandon my docking station and use the dsub and hdmi out ports on the laptop itself. You need a powered converter box if you want to go from vga to dvi, and it wasn’t worth it to me just to keep the dock. But display port and dvi wouldn’t work side by side. Maybe Onboard intel graphics cards are garbage, maybe it’s a limitation of the display port, I didn’t check because it didn’t matter in the end. But it runs both the dsub and hdmi ports with no issues.

Hdmi to dvi, dvi to hdmi, and dsub to dvi adapters all work just fine.

[Delfuego]

I finally got my dual monitor, two computer, single mouse keyboard, and single headset working yesterday.

You know you could have gotten +90% of this achieved with Windows 10 Pro RDP and zero dollars, right?

[Irving]

Another +1 for insulation in the walls and ceiling. Friends were considering having sound proof doors installed when they had their house built, but not sure if they ever pulled the trigger. Just mentioning to acknowledge that they exist.

[Grant H.]

You know you could have gotten +90% of this achieved with Windows 10 Pro RDP and zero dollars, right?

If he doesn't have pro, it's not zero dollars...

[Mazin]

Pre-wire CAT6. Move your network gear downstairs as a pseudo network-room DMARC if possible. Buy good office grade network gear (don't skimp) not residential gear. Upgrade your ISP bandwidth and get a failover ISP if yours goes down often. Same dance we do for small offices. If you get frequent power outages, get UPS batteries. If your expected to be "always on", your gear needs to be too.

I wouldn't worry about sound and video too much, everyone has kids/dogs/etc at home and are pretty forgiving. I however don't do presentations or video conferencing if I can avoid it.

With better network gear, you can control kids internet access, availability, bandwidth and have content filtering too.

Good luck!

^this except I would use CAT8, Might as well upgrade to the 8 now while your doing it. I have everything in cat 8 now with the gig package from comcast and I love my network speeds.