# Do You Have A 'Office'? Need Ideas For Mine!



## happychick (Sep 20, 2010)

Between my Etsy & eBay stores I am now needing to design a home office to keep up with the orders, plus a area to store my inventory of items for sale, boxes & shipping/packing materiel, AND space to work. 
What kind/size of office do you have? What are your main priorities & needs? How do you store everything?

Etsy sales are picking up, but with eBay I sometimes have to ship up to 200 packages a week, so I have bought a business printer and started making space, and was wondering what others did. Design ideas please! 

Thanks ahead of time!


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## Pelenaka (Jul 27, 2007)

Congratulations on needing a dedicated home office.

No real unique ideas other than shelving around the perimeter and a big table or saw horse & sheet of plywood in the center for a package wrapping station. 


~~ pelenaka ~~


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## hippygirl (Apr 3, 2010)

Back when I was selling on ebay, I used two adjacent bedrooms for my business...one for general office/shipping and the other for manufacture.

I still use my office, but now it's just an office ('puter, books, and other electronics). The other bedroom is my craft/sewing room.

Can't have too much office/work space IMO.


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## featherbottoms (May 28, 2005)

I'd think how you organize your work space would depend a lot on what type products you sell. I sell books and they are kind of easy as they are fairly uniform and take up about the same type space. I'd think clothes would be easy, too. However, odd shaped items, breakable things, and perishables, would all have different storage needs.

I'm kind of like hippygirl. I have two rooms in the house devoted just to books. One room has my L shaped desk, a largish two door bookcase for my most expensive books, a closet for new acquisitions and another upright "secretary" type desk with drawers and cabinets for storage, plus I have a separate printer table with storage for printer supplies.

The second room has a large table I use for the laptop and a large work table where I clean books when they first come in and also where I wrap for shipping. I use the laptop in there for shipping to keep from coming back in here as it's on the other side of the house. That room also has 6 large and 1 small bookcases around the walls that hold my inventory. Two shelves of one bookcase hold extra wrapping tape and narrow shelves hold books waiting for payment or on hold for some reason. I don't currently have a space for boxes and they are on a shelf under the wrapping table or stacked in the corner.

In addition to the two rooms in the house, the back deck has about 40 large boxes of books that need to be inventoried but I don't include that in my work area as this is a temporary thing.

The biggest thing I did that helped with my overall attitude about working at home was putting my work desk in an area AWAY from the majority of my stock. It's nice not to look at so many books knowing I need to work on a lot of them. I can bring just a few things here at a time and not feel like I can't stop for the day. Plus, I can shut both doors and go "home" and get out of the office. Just this one thing has helped more than I would have expected. It's nice to be able to have down time without seeing books or desks or thinking I have just "one more thing" I need to get done.


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## happychick (Sep 20, 2010)

Thanks for all your replies everyone - lots of good ideas.  I know many people who have small home-businesses don't have space to make a whole room a office, (we don't really either), but our eBay & Etsy shops are doing so well we're just going to have to _make_ space. 
I love the homestead forum and this section, so I thought I'd see how many of you had offices and what you did!


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## Halfway (Nov 22, 2010)

I have a home office for multiple projects. Some of the must haves....

3 monitor system for multitasking and trading futures.

"under bed" storage bins (stackable) for supplies.

A house plant for greenery!

Case of sticky notes. 

Speakers and i tunes for the ever present, mood altering music of the day.

A novel close at hand for procrastinating and drifting off, he, he, he!

Guitar in the corner for additional procrastination!


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## happychick (Sep 20, 2010)

Oh you're funny!  I do always make sure I have music available though. As I am a musician, listening to good music while I'm working can completely improve my mood!


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## Halfway (Nov 22, 2010)

happychick said:


> Oh you're funny!  I do always make sure I have music available though. As I am a musician, listening to good music while I'm working can completely improve my mood!


I always have piles of new sheet music to learn, but although the procrastination from work can be heavy, the procrastination of learning new songs can be worse!

When in doubt, play Sweet Home Alabama. :run:


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