Last week in General Ian Life News: I moved to a new apartment.
The move itself was a fairly easy one, and one I’d been planning for a long time, to an apartment in the same town close to where I was living before. The move itself went incredibly smoothly, since I had plenty of help and the new apartment was so close to my old place that we could easily shuttle things over using multiple car trips. This was in sharp contrast to previous moves, where I’ve had to scramble and dash around to be out of my old place by a firm deadline.
While I’m very much looking forward to having my own place again (especially once everything’s finally set up!), in this post I want to say a warm goodbye to my old office, where I had a lot of good times and did a lot of meaningful work.
My Old Basement Office
When I came back from Japan in February 2022, I had no car, my old laptop had a broken hinge, most of my stuff was in storage, and my editing work was still only bringing in a trickle of income. So, it made sense to live in a place where I could work to get my footing back.
Before I moved back to the States, I talked with my old roommates from 2016, who’d let me stay with them when I moved back from Nebraska with only a carful of stuff and a remote test-grading job. We’ve known each other since high school, and they’re married with no kids and an extra room where I’d stayed before for about nine months, so we knew what it was like to live together. They were receptive to letting me stay with them for a modest rental fee and helping out with household chores and home repairs, so it was a win-win situation for all three of us.
Though my roommates had an extra bedroom for me, I also really wanted a separate office so I could better separate my work and personal time, especially now that I’d be working from home. Luckily, though, what they did have was a finished section of their basement that we’d renovated waaaaaaaay back in 2017 that they readily let me use.
I wasn’t picky about the aesthetics: for me, what mattered was having a separate place to get my work done. (Having nearly 300 square feet of space was an added bonus!) So, a month or so after I moved in, I set up my new office space.
I started with my main desk, some bookshelves, a bean bag chair, and some old kids furniture that my roommates had, which I repurposed into shelving and extra storage. Right away, though, I found that I didn’t have enough desk space, since I kept having to move my laptop to do non-laptop-type things. So, I picked up a smaller black desk that my roommates weren’t using and set it alongside my main desk, giving me separate spaces for typing and handwriting.
I eventually added a futon couch, a table, and an extra desk I used for doing jigsaw puzzles in the back, where I also had my own bathroom.
From the get-go, I loved having so much space to move around in, and found that I could get up and stretch my legs whenever I wanted. Having the futon couch and bean bag chair were incredibly nice as well, since they gave me not one, but two easy places to lie down and relax when I needed a quick break or was having trouble writing .
Another nice thing was the solitude: Even though I lived with two roommates who also worked from home and moved around a lot during the day, in my basement office I could focus on my writing free from interruptions or stray noises, since the walls muffled sound so well.
Challenges of the Space
There were, however, some significant drawbacks.
The biggest one was that my basement office had no heat, which was fine for the first six months after I moved in, but got to be an issue when fall and winter arrived. To solve this problem I picked up two space heaters, one for each side of the room, that I’d turn on in the morning before sitting down to work. The heaters warmed up the space well, and while the areas near the walls often stayed cold, they certainly made the space liveable in the colder months.
The second major drawback was air quality. While I could keep the windows open in the summer and get a nice breeze, during the winter the air felt…well, less than ideal. Something about the way the house was built also led to differences in air pressure, so moving from the basement back upstairs also made me want to pop my ears, and I found myself getting headaches more frequently than before.
A third drawback was a less-than-ideal electrical setup. Because my roommate and I didn’t know how to do electrical work when we did the 2017 renovations, the room only had two power outlets, one of which was on the other side of the room by the washer. This meant that having my desk by the window (and using the heaters in the winter!) required hooking everything up to the main outlet via a heavy-duty extension cord. While it got the job done and I never had any problems, I worried about overloading the circuit and knew it wasn’t a long-term solution.
Finally, the drawback that bothered me the most was that in the age of Zoom, I worried about the social embarrassment of working in a basement office with metal pillars, an electrical box, and a washing machine clearly visible. During my first client meeting I felt self-conscious about having these things show up behind me on video, and soon started blurring my background before I moved my laptop to face the side wall. (You can see my usual setup on my Authors Bantering videos with Josh Bresslin.)
Though I eventually got used to the limited view, I felt compelled to never move my camera for fear of a client seeing the larger room, and worried that people would piece together what kind of setup I had (which I now realize was WAY overblown of me).
Final Thoughts: Onwards and Upwards
I had a lot of good times in my old office: I wrote most of my Secret New Novel there, built my author website there, and had a lot of good memories in that basement room. Even though my new office has a way better setup (which I’m excited to share when it’s all done!), I’ll still miss my old space and the moments I had there, which represent a really important stage of my creative career.
Moving forward, though, I still have a lot of unpacking to do, pictures to hang, and maybe even some renovations (!) to make in this new space, and I’m looking forward to the challenges and the new memories I’ll make here. Stay tuned for more to come, because of course, I’ll definitely keep you posted :-)