As briefly alluded to elsewhere, I've spent my whole career working like the subject of a stock photo: no external keyboard, mouse, monitor, anything—just me with a laptop perched on some non-work-dedicated surface, smiling into the middle distance and holding a forkful of salad.

Part of the reason I never really prioritized an office is that I possess one of history's worst spinal columns; a real all-timer. When I walk I sound like a guitar case full of broken plates. That means that I work standing, because sitting begets hunching, and hunching begets Ibuprofin. So, years ago, I got myself a little adjustable laptop stand, set it on a non-work-context table, and that was that; no sense having a bunch of dedicated space for a desk I can't sit at and a chair I can't sit in. As you might expect, this meant that said table looked increasingly like the throne from the latter half of Akira (1988), overtaken by cords and cables and thumb drives and one (1) anguished little weird guy.

The other part of the reason is that I live in a house (don't jinx it) ten minutes outside of Boston (don't jinx it). What—I'm just gonna have an entire room? To type in? What am I, Ben Affleck? There are only like twenty or thirty rooms in greater-Boston total. I don't just have an entire room laying around.

No, I'll tell you what I did have, though: a hammer, a considerable supply of ibuprofin (see above), the barest semblance of a plan, and that one closet. You know the one closet; you probably have it too. Maybe you've got an old window unit air conditioner in there, a cardboard tube containing a poster you'll never hang up, an air mattress that hasn't been used in years. Two clothes hangers, as empty as they are mismatched. Some bubble wrap "in case you need to mail something someday." We had one such closet, and that sucker was like three whole feet by four entire feet—man, that's a Camberville one-bedroom. That's an office.

So I tore apart that one closet, ran new wiring for outlets and an overhead light, snaked some network cables, put down a floor with leftovers we had kicking around from redoing the living room years ago, re-tiled the ceiling for no practical reason, and—most importantly—devised and 3D-printed a wall mount contraption to hold my laptop, two additional monitors, and all the accoutrements required to make the whole thing go.

I mainly call it the "cloffice," sometimes "the Gundam" when I suspect that piloting it may cause me to have some kind of nervous breakdown, and "the Eva" at such times as I outright refuse to get in it.

The Cloffice

The whole thing very literally hinges on two feet of 35mm pole, upon which are a pair of monitor arms and a swing-arm tray thing for my laptop.

The pipe is bolted to the wall with a set of mounts I 3D printed. In fact, it's 3D-printed contraptions all the way down from there: all the fittings for attaching the ring light, microphone boom, and webcam; the game controller sits in a little 3D printed holder that's bolted to underside of the tray, likewise the hook for the headphones. We're not gonna talk about how the whole thing snapped off the wall week one because I forgot to crank up the infill percentage on the first prototype wall mounts—that's not gonna come up in this post, or indeed ever again now that they've been redesigned, reinforced, and printed with heavier-duty PLA. I stood on one of 'em.

The walls are covered in sound-proofed panels—there's no avoiding looking like some kind of dorkass Dracula standing in a coffin, but at least it doesn't have to sound that way. The one soundproofing exception is four feet of slatwall paneling—kind of like pegboard—for storage and modular shelving. I fully expected I'd be, like, putting my coffee on the floor or balancing it on my head while I type, but the waist-high slatwall shelving gives me plenty of ~desk space without so much that I start piling books and nailguns and stuff on it, as one does when given any sufficiently large surface. I mostly keep the shelves tucked under the display, but they slide out to wherever I want them. Also tucked back in the corner are a little printed Framework "expansion card" holder and USB/MicroSD card holder fitted with slatwall hooks.

The monitors have unexpectedly functional USB hubs built into them, which I use for anything stationary or in need of charging—microphone, light, webcam, headphones, etc.—which means that while this behemoth wasn't really made for walkin' in the first place, I can still pack it up and go with minimal fuss. I mean, I don't; I have a raggedy old Surface Pro 3 that I Linux'd up for on-the-go, which has the unintended benefit of being too old and busted for me to do pretty much anything but type in a Markdown file, providing me with a truly organic distraction-free writing experience.

All told: pretty good! I went into this with my sights set squarely on "acceptable, but weird," and landed on "good, parentheses, weird." What more could one want?