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The geek den

Since we bought our new house, it's been nothing but work. I really don't mind the work, but it's still work. Our house is a 3bd/3b, with one bedroom/bathroom on each floor, and it's about 1700sqft. The deal is I get the bedroom in the basement as my work space, my wife gets the bedroom on the main floor for her own room, and then we have our master bedroom on the third floor. Well, the first day we move in, the basement floods. What had happened is the bank we bought the house from didn't winterize the house correctly, and the water pipes to the spickets on the front and back of the house and burst, and as soon as I cut the water on, they flooded the walls, and the carpet. (I do have a video of the "leak", maybe I'll put it up). This started the first project, tearing out all the wet drywall/carpet fixing the pipes and making sure there was no mold build up. This took about a month. I also used this time to run ethernet and re-run some of the coax through the basement which is a big plus to have. But now we have a really nice basement with brand new carpet and new paint and everything is great. The next project was working on my room in the basement and getting it setup as my play/work area, and here is how it turned out.

The first thing I wanted, was a large working space (desk). I had originally used two old doors that were left in the house as the desk top, but they were hollow and dropped in the middle, so I replaced those with these pre-finished pieces of wood I got from Lowes for $30. The desk is supported on the wall by 2x4's that are screwed into the studs, and by 4x2" PVC pipes. I mounted the table-top about an inch away from the wall so I could get cables behind it really easliy, and I also drilled a few 2.5" holes where the support beams were. I used caps to secure the legs to the desk so they wont kick out so easy, and used some male/female threaded adapters to make "adjustable" feet for leveling the desk. So far this has worked out really well and gives me about 22.5sqft or working space for about $50 of materials. I also got two 6' power strips from my office that they were going to toss out that I have running behind the desk.

A big deal for me, was to have an area in my workspace totally devoted to building/modifying electronics. I thought it would be a good idea to have some more direct light for illuminating the workspace and found these wall lamps at IKEA for $5 each.These were great because the swivel and I can direct the light wherever it's needed. I also found a 44 drawer storage container that I use for storing components/wire/equipment.

I also have my main computer in my room which is a new computer I built this past summer so that I could play newer games on it. It's only really used for gaming/media.

I left the right side of my desk open for other computers for my wife to use when she wants to be down here with me or play games. I also aquired a slightly older dell small formfactor machine that I'm using as a linux server for running most of the services in my house (dhcp, dns) and it doubles as a repository (SVN) for a couple projects that I'm working on. I'm also using it to run a wiki (confluence). We're not very good about filing our records, so I decided to use a wiki and make a digital copy of everything so it would be easy to find. It's also really useful to have a central location for different account information (like for utilties), calendars and to-do lists, and all the important information on the machine gets backed up every night to a 8gb thumbdrive I got from Microcenter.

The last thing I brought into my room, was a 3'x6.5' white board that my work was going to throw out. I also managed to find a whiteboard stand (albeit wasn't made for a 3x6' board), that I modified to hold the whiteboard. This is the only piece I have that my wife really doesn't like ;p But I really like having it around, and it is my room

So this is my work/play area now. I'm really happy with the way it turned out. I've already gotten to use my work space quite a bit and it's nice to work in. I've got a couple of projects already completed that I need to document and throw up here, so those should be up soon.