Studio / home office in turmoil...

My studio / home office is in turmoil. For years, I've been working for companies as a salesman & designer on a commission or sub-contract basis. Sometimes, they provided a workspace, cubby or office of my own. When the workload increased, I stayed longer hours or took work home to complete. Remembering back more than 30 years ago, my design drawings were done at a drafting table in their facility. I had a portable drafting table at home maintained a fully functioning office, complete with phone lines, FAX, scanner & printer.

10-15 years ago, I abandoned the drafting table and started making drawings by computer. I subscribed to a service that allowed me to seamlessly remotely link my home & office computers. They claimed to have a secure connection and all seemed okay. With the approval of the company I'm working for now, the IT guy said there was a 'worm hole' security weakness to their network and redid the connection so all my files are supported by Google products that synchronize to all my devices. I no longer have to pay for the other service.

For the past few months, I've been working on a project that has lots of rooms. Main kitchen, catering kitchen, summer kitchen, 6 bathrooms, his & hers master baths, bar, 3 laundry rooms... it's a big freaking job and lots of drawings. Most of these dealings are digital, but my meeting notes are on printed copies, so I need lots of space to layout all the documents. I'm a paper guy and retain more information if the drawing is printed and not on a screen.

I used to have dual monitors before and downsized to a single 27" monitor for each system. Enough is enough. My eyes aren't getting any better. One monitor is 10 years old and the icons are starting to 'burn into' the screen. I have one 32" monitor for drawing and bought another that's new in the box waiting for me to get out of 'procrastination mode' and change that old monitor.

Year end now and I'm moving things around, archiving stuff and putting folders into plastic stackable bins for future reference. Okay, as long as I'm doing that, it's time to reconfigure the layout to get the added desk space.

Part of the turmoil is mixing and matching. The older monitors have VGA connections. Some have DVI, the newer have HDMI and the newest have Display Port. The VGA doesn't support ultra-high resolution, so I'm only using that on a computer that does email and web surfing. I bought some adapters that change the DVI and HDMI to work with Display Port so I can take advantage of high resolution with the larger monitors.

The showroom will be closed between Christmas and New Year, so I'm not planning to see too much activity next week. If I stay focused (no pun intended) I'll be able to organize 'my everything' that will allow me to put an end to the turmoil I've created.