After living in our “new” house for a year and a half, it was finally time to start finishing my basement office — where I work every day. It’s a small 8x10 space that’s adjacent to our home theatre. It houses my Mac setup as well as all my guitar gear (the guitars are a hobby of mine and not a profession, but we don’t have space for a separate room elsewhere).
We painted the home theatre a wonderful cool grey colour, but when we first moved in, I wasn’t sure if that would be too much for a basement, so I left two walls white just to live in it a while. I also didn’t have any shelves (the condo we rented previously had built-in shelves that belonged to the owner), so I always had a box or two on the floor I couldn’t unpack.
Here are some before photos:
You can see the box on the floor in the photo above.
And here are the white walls.
As you can see, there’s a lot of empty space here, and it’s not super pleasant. It’s just a box. (We had the blinds covered up so we could paint around and under them.)
After a lot of hemming and hawing (including some hemming and hawing in this thread), I finally decided on a shelving unit for the office. I had some more guitar gear coming too, and it was time to start making this an actual livable space.
First, we painted everything grey and installed the shelves. It’s darker than it looks in the photos (the iPhone is over compensating by a lot), but it’s not too dark. It’s a really bright basement. (The electricians were angry about the number of lights I told them to install, but they eventually said the effect is very nice and they all got paid.)
Please ignore the vacuum cleaner and the mess.
There’s still a lot to do. I’ve unpacked everything and set up the new gear. In the next month, I’m going to hang some of my guitars on the empty wall. Also, some of this new guitar gear is rack mountable, and since I’ll be bringing it back and forth to church a fair bit, I’m going to get a weather-resistant rack for it and store it all on the floor for a cleaner look.
In the meantime, the office looks like this:
I’m getting over COVID, so don’t mind the orange juice and the tissues. I had to get some studio monitors as well (related to the guitar processor), so those are indeed new.
I also have yet to recycle the packaging for this new gear (did I mention I have COVID?)
And in a couple weeks, hopefully 3 guitars will get mounted above the amp against the wall in this photo.
I’ll share another update when it’s done, but I’m excited about the progress so far and thought I’d share something here first.
If there’s any interest, I can do a full rig rundown in the next update.