Three Steps to Organizing a Home Work Space

If you work from home, pay your bills electronically, do some blogging or study at home, you could do with a dedicated work space!

Photo by Alisa Anton

Although we have gone through a few attempts to set up a home office in various places in our home, I have recently needed to think again about how to do this effectively. I started out with a desk in our bedroom - this was a temporary fix but it was not calming to have a reminder of work that needed to be done. Next I tried a small corner of the living room - but the area was too small and drafty and didn't work well as there was not much space to spread out papers. When we re-organised the living room I moved the printer to our outside art room/music studio. This area was initially a great place to work, but we found it was not easy to have to go outside in the late evenings to work there and it was too far away to always have a good internet connection. I was tending to set up on the coffee table or dining table each time I needed to do some work. Time for a re-think!

The following questions have helped me to re-assess our work space requirements:

1. What purposes will we using this space for? What will we need to fulfill those purposes?
We need our work space to accommodate our home admin, my blogging and homework for my daughter. To do these things we need a desk with drawers for homework supplies and lots of work surface space. We also need enough light to work at night and a good internet connection.

2. Who will be using the space? When will it be used?
The whole family will use it at different times of day from mornings until late evenings.

3. Where is the best location considering the above requirements?
I have decided to move our work space back to the living room as it is the largest room in the house and the place we spend most of our time as a family. I have chosen to use a long console table as a desk so it is not too out of place in our living room and gives plenty of room to spread out paperwork. There is a also a wall light above the console table so it can easily be used at night. We will try it out as a solution, but so far it is working out well.

What are your thoughts on creating a work space at home? Where have you located your work space? If you would like to read my previous post about creating a home office click here.