197/366 | My New Office

When P moved in a few years ago, I kept the little space I had carved out for myself as an office, as mine. A couple of years later, we decided that P should work at home instead of a rented space, to save money. And I had to give up the office space to be shared. Sharing, however, did not work out as we intended (during the day, it was P’s. during evenings, it was mine). P needed to work a lot of nights. And whenever I wanted to use the space, I had to move his stuff out of the way first. I rarely sat there anymore and my beautiful Cinema display were mostly unused. My frustration and resentment slowly built up.

Last week, I thought about how we really needed to solve this problem. I decided to give up that office space entirely, because I was the occasional user. Instead, what I needed was my own desk on wheels. Our place is very small. The “desk” needed to be barely big enough to hold my macbook and cinema display. A small coffee table would do. However, it needed to be slightly taller than regular coffee table so I could have my elbows bent at 90 degrees while sitting on a couch and using the computer. It needed to be on wheels because I wanted to be able to push it aside when it was not in use.

Online search did not turn up anything that satisfied those 3 requirements. So today, we went to IKEA to find hackable furniture. As we walked through various furniture sections, we found some candidates. We were going to attach casters ourselves. Unfortunately, none cleared the size and height criteria. Well, that is until we hit the kid furniture section. Boom, there it was. A kid-sized table (for play dinner maybe?) with the perfect size, height, and hackable legs. Sure the shape is not as simple and modern as I hoped, but check it out. Now I have my own mobile office!

Kudos to P for insisting on the IKEA hack solution, and putting all the pieces together for me.