Having worked out of my home for the last year and a half in DIY office pods I had built, the time had come for the Mark III office space. I must admit that I dreamed of many different areas for this next iteration, specifically one outside or where I could get a view of the outside. While Mark II did have a window, all I saw was the dark inside of the garage during the day, so it was pretty dark. Being in Arizona, I was looking forward to getting to see the sunny weather more often during the day, so I dreamed of having Mark III have an exterior window somewhere.
I’ll briefly discuss some of my potential plans, and I even had contractors come out to give me estimates, but in the end I went a different direction entirely, as you’ll see. My first thought was do a more full build of the Mark II inside the 3rd bay of the garage in the current location. I would cut a hole in the wall and add a window, which would look out onto the front patio area, and get me an East-facing view of outside. This was valid, but venting a more built-in a/c unit not into the garage was going to be an issue, with the nicest being essentially a dryer-vent right in the front entry to the house, not ideal. Then I dreamed of building the office out on the patio cover in the backyard, taking 10′ or so of the 20′ “balcony” that wasn’t an actual balcony. I tried to get plans to the house, but the builder no longer had them, so myself and the contractors couldn’t determine how much load we could put on it without having to do some serious upgrades, spelled expensive. So in the end that plan was out, it was a dream though, it would have had 3 windows and been roughly 10′ x 10′, but alas, it was not to be.
Then I did a LOT of research and planning and sketching and planning some more for building my own office pod out in the backyard. In the end I really liked that idea, being an office at home, but away from the main house. But in the end we didn’t want to give up the space, especially with 5′ offsets from the fence per city of Gilbert, in the backyard, so in the end we nixed that option as well. So with every other option out or just being too expensive, that brought us back around to the final option that we actually went forward with: build an office in the corner of the master bedroom. Fortunately our house has an insanely large master bedroom, and I have an awesome wife that agreed to the plan, so then the real planning began.
Given that this was my first office inside the actual house, my first concern was again noise. I had a brief experiment of an office in a bedroom of the rental house before this house, and it didn’t go so well. Knowing that, I spent a lot of time researching noise-cancellation and insulation methods and building and construction techniques to minimize sound transfer. You’ll see that consideration in almost every phase of the build-out so it is definitely worth mentioning. It might seem a bit overkill, but it has helped a ton, so I’m glad I did all of it, even though it was a pain.
Marked future location of office buildIn the above photo you can see the rough location for the planned office. It turns out that there was a built-in ethernet port on the back wall along with a power outlet, and then another outlet under the window that would be joining the office. There is also one of the 4 built-in recessed lights in that corner, along with an a/c vent, but due to the last house experiment I knew that wouldn’t work, so I just covered it with sheet metal. You can also see that there will be an external window included, with no demolition or anything substantial required. I will point out that the size was kind of pre-determined by the existing features: 1) the area between the windows was the only logical place to put the longer wall and 2) the door into the master bath drew the second wall location. The space is not big, but it was just about the size I was going for. I think the area worked out to be 6′-6″ x 5′-6″, so enough, but not spacious.
Being the obsessive planner that I am, I took to mapping out the whole build in Sketch-Up, the 3D modeling software. I had never used it before, but after some playing around, I got to being pretty good with it. I wanted to be sure I had everything mapped out exactly how I wanted it, especially since this was now inside the house, and in the master bedroom, it had to look pretty good!
I should also add that because it was in the master bedroom, I wanted to tread as lightly as I could, “harming” as little as possible in this build, in case we ever had to reverse course. My final bit of pre-work was in attaching a series of cross studs in the attic over where the short wall would attach to the ceiling. Since the joists ran parallel with the short wall (the one with the door in it) I would need to provide some cross studs in several locations as points of attachment for that short wall. So I spent an hour or so up in a crowded part of the attic to put several short stud connectors between the studs, with the wide part being flat on the bottom of the ceiling sheet rock, and then screwing those into place into the existing joists. Once those were in, it began to get more real.
For more, continue on to: Part II – The Build
Pysan 