Office Refresh 2025

As a sort of last minute thing last weekend I decided it was time to sort out my home office. I had planned on doing it at some point this year, but a combination of some decent deals on Amazon Prime day, and some exceptionally hot weather making cycling slightly too onerous meant I had a window of opportunity.

I had a list of tasks;
1) Repaint the room
2) Sort out miniatures display cases
3) Generally sort out storage
4) Upgrade from a laptop to a desktop
5) Sort out the desk area generally

So my office is a slightly weird shape (bedroom 3 on the Rightmove floorplan). My desk is in the lower left corner, tucked into an alcove with the window to my left. The rest of the room is quite narrow, and there is a supporting arch between the wider section and the narrower section (due to an extension in ~2007...previously this was a very small box-room). The section my desk is in is the "office", and the rest of the room is "storage" really. When we moved in we didn't have time to do any serious re-decoriation, so the room was pretty much as-is (off white, lost of marks on the walls where sticky pads and blue-tac had been used to hold things to walls). Most of my storage is black Ikea Besta Units with white Kuggis boxes

Repaint the Room

This took forever. Move as much furniture out as possible, and then get the rest into the middle of the room. Cover everything, clean walls and skirting board, then start painting. I made life harder by using "feature colours". The plan was to make the "office" area feel more separate to the "storage" area, done by adding dark blue walls to the office (east and west walls as per floor plan), and also on the interior of the supporting arch. This meant loads of masking off of areas, and lots of re-edging. I also have a lot of woodwork in the room (door frame, the airing cupboard door, window sill, and lots of corners) that had to be done. I did the rest of the walls pure white, which has made it feel waaaaay bigger and brighter. I was a little worried it would look clinical, but with all the storage units back in it's very clean and modern.

Sort out miniatures display case

I still have nearly all my Warhammer miniatures, and since we moved they have been boxed up and stored, which I consider a shame. I have a couple of glass-fronted Besta units, and ageas ago I bought some Ikea Smart lighting and some white vinyl to line the inside of the cabinets...I just never got round to assembling it. As everything was away from the walls, I had an opportunity to get this done finally. A bit of a faff to do, involving drilling wire holes in the back, but the end result is that I now have my "best" (subjectively) 3 armies on display, with a light-up display case. They are opposite the door, so are the first thing you see entering the room. Very happy to get this done.

The end result is about as good as I could achieve. Not perfect, but I had to draw a line under it and get the room back into working order for Monday (as it's still my work-from-home office).

Generally sort out storage

Some of this is still a work in progress, but the plans are in place, and it's not much work. As a quick list;

• Rucksac storage - added hooks to inside of support arch next to desk, no longer have bags piled on floor
• Shelves above a lower Besta area to hold the large Lego crane I have, and the AMS for the 3D Printer. Shelves have arrived, need to wave a drill at them
• Medals and controllers - Behind my desk is a very small sofa...mostly used for dogs looking moodily at me during video calls, and for me to sit on when I want a break from the desk. Going to add pegboard on teh wall above that to display my participation medals for various events I've done, and some artwork I've had which I really like. Can also add game controller holders etc on there, and make it a functional area. There are a number of items I can 3D print that plug into pegboard, so mounting stuff here will be super-easy.
• Charging zone off the desk - completely separately to my laptop, I have a pile of wires plugged into a USB multiplug for charging headphones, bike lights etc etc. Once the lego crane and AMS are off the desk, I can move that there and further tidy up my working area

Upgrade from a laptop to a desktop

I've been full-time work-from-home for ~3-4 years now, and realistically will remain that way for the rest of my working career. I rarely go down to the office (they moved to smaller offices this year, and now cannot fit everyone for all-hands). The laptop I bought in 2021 has slower been consumed by cables and wires on the desk, and at this point has a larger footprint than a desktop PC. It also doesn't like hot weather, sitting there screaming all afternoon on summer days. It has chains of USB hubs coming out of it, HDMI cables etc, and the screen is small enough to not be used very much due to my deteriorating eyesight.

So after years of laptops, I am going back to a desktop. This is the build, with an extra monitor to replace the laptop one that will be going away. It's sitting on the desk next to me right now, going through the tedious installation process before I re-organise the desk this weekend. it's the frst time I've had a "good" PC case, previously I bought cheap ones, boxy ones, however I wanted a small footprint, and a clean looking desk. The Fractal Design Terra is a stupidly popular SFF case, as it looks clean. I've gone for a mid-range spec, but with modern hardware. It's full AMD, mostly as I could not justify the nVidia price uplift for what seems to be sub-optimal performance. I've tried to future-proof it (32Gb of RAM, over-specced PSU, plenty of storage, PCI-e gen 5) so I should be able to keep it relevant for quite a while with upgrades, rather than the full replacements I was doing with laptops every 3-4 years. It was quite fun building it up...though even with a fully-modular PSU, getting the cables squeezed in was a bit of a challenge while keeping clear of all the fans.

The first thing I've done is to benchmark it...apart from anything else this tells me if I've assembled it correctly and set up BIOS...if it was underperforming compared to similar spec machines, I'd know something was awry.

So it's trending ~50% higher on scores than the Razer Blade laptop. I also did a Stress Test (20 loops of the Steel Nomad test), and it got a 99.2% stability (with a passmark of 97%), so it's comfortably within thermal limits. I was quite surprised at how it did in teh port Royal raytracing, as in my head AMD GPU's are not strong it that area, and I thought the nVidia 3070m would have done far better in comparison there.

Sort out the desk area generally

This will be the final thing, once the desktop is fully installed and ready to be a daily driver (probably this weekend). I can sort out the mess of cables that are protruding from the laptop, and plug in all the monitors to the small black box instead. The Blade will become a dedicated travel laptop. It's quite interesting looking at where the previous machines on the benchmark list have gone;

• The MSI - had HDD's removed (now running Raspberry Pi's via SATA-to-USB connectors), and was disposed of when we moved home
• The Fang - given to my cycling coach for use as a video editing machine
• The XPS - now under the TV in the living room, being used as a media machine to watch cycling via VPN
• ZwiftBox - in the garage, still running Zwift. Now upgraded to an i5 processor to allow video capture
• The Blade 14 - to be used as a back-up machine, and occasional travel device

Where are the picture?

I'm waiting for the final touches (shelves up, pegboard up, desk sorted), and also to remove the massive pile of boxes that result from a new desktop build.