Pysan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y63lqNPnfgI

I work from home in Arizona, and with young kids also at home with my wife during the day, working inside the house was not an option for us. After building Mark 1 and using it for around 4 months, we decided it was time to move to a more kid-friendly area. So we moved to Gilbert AZ, and I had been pondering ways I would improve on my first attempt, especially assuming the new house would not have an alcove, and indeed it did not. So this led to be design a standalone office pod, using things I had learned from the Mark I experiment.

When we moved to Gilbert, the house did have one bedroom downstairs by the kitchen, and I worked out of that room as the office for a few weeks as I was building Mark II. However that office was noisy, even with the door closed and worse than that, it was HOT! It had an a/c vent, and was a good-sized room, maybe 12’x10′ but the a/c didn’t run often enough to keep it cool with myself and the computer/monitors in there, so I would be hitting the upper 80’s and even into the 90’s during the day. Needless to say I took breaks often, and even had to keep the door open which made it even louder. All of this just furthered my resolve to finish the Mark II office pod.

I decided I would again use 2×4’s as my frame as they are relatively light and easy to work with. Knowing it needed to be standalone that meant I was aiming for more of a cube than a single wall this time around. I basically framed up 4 walls that were around 6′ long by 6’2″ high. Once those were all completed, I then screwed them together using 3 screws at each joint using 3.5″ deck screws (I used GRK UberGrade Fasteners: 10 x 3-1/8″). One important consideration I had was I wanting this version to be easily disassembled and able to be reassembled as we again were renting this house, and didn’t know that we would stay much more than the 1-year lease. With that said, 3 screws were plenty to hold the walls together, and easy enough to take apart.

Since I was building this by myself, I came up with the idea to use bungie cords to hold the walls in place until I was able to screw them together. This helped me dry assemble the 4 walls, without committing, and without having anything fall over and crush myself or other things.

There was a lot of calculations involved in estimating how many 2×4’s and foam panels I would need. As you can see, similar to Mark I, I chose to also use the 2″ rigid foam panels that are good for R-13 insulation value. The side panels were pretty easy, just a matter of cutting the foam panels to length, and in the case of the upper panel, in width as well. But I found that with a sharp exacto knife they cut pretty easily. I used a 4′ level to make sharpie marks along the length so I had a line to follow, and I would then score one side along the line mark, then snap the board on that score mark. Then I just use the knife to cut through the foil backing and poof, nice straight lines.

As long as you don’t put point pressure on these boards, I was also able to stand on them and I would put a 2×8 on them and then kneel on that so it would distribute my weight so I was able to work easily across the surface of the boards with minimal damage to the boards.

For the roof, since there was no weight on it, I chose to just lay them across the top without any framed rafter of any kind.

In my first attempt at the Mark II, I chose to do the sliding foam panel for the door again, that you can just make out the narrow “doorway” in the back (garage-door side) in the above shot. I later filled that in and added a hinged door that was SOO much better than the sliding foam panel. You can also see in the above shot the cutout for the same air conditioning unit from the Mark I. I should also note that I am building this in the garage, in Arizona, in July, hence the 2 fans, and they still barely helped. You’ll also note in some of the earlier shots the framing I put in place to hold the weight of the a/c unit, since I didn’t have a bench to rest it on this time.

Inside view on concrete floor

In order to elevate the experience a bit, we had an older plus Costco rug that I cut to size to fit the pod. I also added the foundation insulation around the base just to try my best to keep the critters out of the inside. As you can see in the above pictures, I’m just inside the garage door by about a foot.

Next up it was time to get everything closed up. Not shown in this picture is me putting the desk in the bigger opening in the bottom half before I sealed it up. You can also see in the above photos that I taped up the seams between the panels and on the corners to try to cut any air gaps remaining. In the directly above photo, above the a/c unit you can just see the bright light of a small USB LED light I had, so I put it through a hole in the roof, and then attached a longer USB cable to it and brought it down near my keyboard. Whenever I was on a call, I would plug in the USB cable to my keyboard HUB so that my family would know I was on a call, sort of a poor-man’s “on-the-air” sign.

On the back-wall I had put on the top 4′ a piece of OSB plywood. For those not familiar, OSB needs some de-gassing time, so I recommend you give it some time to air out if you copy my lead on using that. For my backdrop I used a painter’s drop cloth from Home Depot that cost me I think $10. I simply used a staple gun and stapled the drop cloth to the OSB and lower 2×4 frame, stretching the drop-cloth as tightly as I could to get rid of the wrinkles. I even ironed the top half to get rid of the lines it had from the packaging. I then went to Costco and got two 11×17 pictures of Arizona from their default gallery, I think they were $3.50 each or something like that just to spice up my background. This photo is actually as we were moving to the next house, so a year after I built this, so I’m actually taking it apart, and thought it would be a good time to get a shot of the inside with the roof off.

Finally we have the finished view from the inside. You can see the a/c unit above me, and I would just turn it on to a level that worked fairly well. Then I had a stoplight with LED bulb in it, and a nicer lamp (also LED – I didn’t need any extra heat in here). For my desk I just have a standard Ikea desk in white melamine with my office chair. There was enough room for me to scoot the chair back enough to get in and out of it, but not much more than that. The finished dimensions on the inside were like 5′-5″ wide by 5′-8″ long and 6′-1″ tall, so not a lot of room to mess around. I could just stand up inside it, but there wasn’t a lot of room to standup with the chair inside, so wasn’t a huge concern.

Finally the last photo is a shot of me re-assembling Mark II in the new house we bought in Gilbert after deciding to settle down. So I worked out of this version of the office pod for 1yr in the Gilbert rental, and then another several months in our new house, before I finished Mark III.

 

Bill of materials: 

22 – 2×4 studs @ $2.89/each

9 – 2″ x 4’x8′ PolyISO Insulation @ $32.22/each

2 – #10 x 3-1/8 in. Star Drive Bugle Head R4 Multi-Purpose Wood Screw (70-Pack) @ $12.20/each

1 – Painter’s cloth @ $10.00/each

1 – Oriented Strand Board (OSB) 15/32 in. x 4 ft. x 8 ft @ $12.85

TOTAL: $400.81

 

Everything else you see I had already, so it was just using things we already had on hand. You can see the mark on the carpet in the last photo, but I also had a chair mat, otherwise my chair never would have moved on that thick carpet. Also being in Arizona, I have to say, that while the rental house we had a total of 5 scorpions inside, I never once had one in the pod with me in the garage. I must admit though, I did check every morning with a black-light flashlight I had just in case! While not applicable to the actual Mark II, because I mentioned it, here is one of the scorpions we found inside that rental house, and I’m showing it under the black light, things are crazy! And I’ll leave you with that.