Creative Ergonomic Desk Chairs

Creative Ergonomic Desk Chair - Ergonomic desk chairs can be beautiful and unique when meet the right designer. Consider the following features when choosing an ergonomic desk chair. The office furniture system with minimalist design and ergonomic construction is vital for working in large space. Installing office furniture system could foster a creative and very personal atmosphere promoting efficiency and productivity. Ergonomic office furniture including office furniture chairs, desk, file cabinet and bookshelves.

Comfortable ergonomic chairs protect from injury and are capable of improving mood in office. Modern ergonomic chair reclines and locks into several different positions for rest and support. Creative Ergonomic Desk Chair

Ergonomic desk chairs come in various shapes and sizes. Their futuristic designs sometimes can be very creative and imaginative to say the least. Maintain physical condition of the body stay fit despite sitting in front of the computer for hours. The best solution is to buy furniture computer desk. following the example part of the Zero-Gee computer workstation ergonomics.

Ergonomic saddle stools belong to the category of innovative design evolving from and emulating the horse saddle in horseback riding. It uses the back ergonomics of horseback riding which requires one to sit up straight and maintain an absolute perpendicular position of the back and the seat. Yet, ergonomic saddle stools are extremely comfortable, once you get used to it due to the high quality materials used for it. Most come in five star castor wheels for easy mobility.

Ergonomic saddle stools enable your legs can then widen to drop naturally, giving a healthy yet stable stance. For those of us who have had bad backs before, you would realize that this position is best for improved spine health. In the long run, this position also helps to reinforce back muscles. This unique design helps eliminate key problems of blood circulation and also corrects sitting position to prevent slouch. One key aspect of the ergonomic saddle stools is that it is height adjustable to cater to different types of users, eg adults and children.

The key benefits of the saddle stool abound, namely, alleviating your lower back pain, reducing tired shoulders, necks and headaches as well as preventing muscular tension fatigue, and finally resolving bad posture issues. It also reduces work related upper limb disorders such carpal tunnel syndrome and other musculoskeletal disorder.

[ image :Creative and Ergonomic work station Globus ]

From the perspective of enhancing well being, saddles stools also enables good arm-hand coordination, helps improve blood circulation and digestion, as well as strengthen muscle tone and abdominal muscles.

Contemporary armless office chair, ergonomic chair

Unique computer desk chair, ergonomic chair design

[ image : Unique office ergonomic chairs designs ]

Saddle stools are most often used within a busy office environment which requires the user to multitask actively and physically. You might be required to use a few computers situated at different work desks, or do multiple tasks such as filing at one corner or the workstation and input filing data into a computer at the other corner of the work bench. The saddle stool is a handy chair in keeping up with the workflow yet at the same time, helping you to constantly maintain good posture.

They are ideal for dentists, surgeons, vets, hairdressers, therapists, technicians and clerical staff. Those made of higher stool height with adjustable foot rings are mostly made for standing height work, key users of whom are namely architects, draftspersons, laboratory technicians or even musicians and artists.

With new and minimalist office furniture you have found the transition from working at the busy office to a home office and become easier. This is modern office furniture inspiration for your large space in a home office and you like minimalist, black and white interior design from ideashomedesigns

This category of ergonomic desk chairs do not come cheap but make for great spine health investment over the long run. The high end range of saddle stools is at about 1,100 dollars while on the other end of the spectrum costs about 200 dollars. Of course the materials used as well as the comfort level are key to the respective price points. Key brands are Bambach Saddle Seat and Humanscale. The former provides a model with backrest as well.

Attractive and functional home office furniture, interesting space-saving ideas for efficient work space arrangement, office ergonomic chair designs, book shelves and well chosen accessories create stylish office decorating and comfortable modern office interiors.

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Top 10 Home Office Hacks

Top 10 Home Office Hacks ? Whatever kind of work you do at home, your office is one place you want to spend the time to make comfortable and convenient. Take 10 of our tips on organizing, fixing, and streamlining that space. Work at home ideas, advice, business support and education for independent Sparkplugging supports today's home office workers - where life, work, & purpose are one. When Every Office is the Home Office Our list of the top 101 homebased this advice to improve the odds of success when you start your home business. This is home business resources, home business magazines, advice for starting a home 5 Small Manageable Things You Can Do to Organize Your Home Office Right Now

Photo by pdsphil.

10. Get more natural or ambient light

If you aren't blessed with ample windows or non-annoying overhead lighting, getting a bit of illumination around your workspace can be accomplished in ways more subtle, and less expensive, than adding more lamps. One of the Dumb Little Man blog's 10 cheap home office improvements involves a strategically placed mirror, which helps those with bright light going the wrong way re-capture it. When Jason was deep in his extreme home office makeover, he found that cheap rope lights made for great ambient illumination, especially as the sunlight changes in early morning and late afternoon.

9. Keep your PCs clean and quiet

For a dedicated work desk, a desktop PC makes sense—it's far more bang for the buck, and you can use whatever size monitor you'd like. But desktop systems tend to get dirty, hot, and louder over time. Luckily, you need only a can of compressed air, some household oil, and a screwdriver to evacuate PC dust bunnies and get your system running with lower drag again. If it's just a noisy, case-shaking hard drive at the heart of your overly-audible system, try quieting it with rubber shocks or elastic suspenders. Starting over with a new system? Build it for silence from the start, and you'll hardly ever know your system is running.

8. Cover the non-obvious comforts

A really, seriously comfy chair. Wall colors other than white or beige. Extras of everything you occasionally run out of. You've probably put a whole bunch of thought into the precise layout of your computer desktop, but the trim and details of your home office often go sorely under-attended. The tail end of Sara Rimer's write-up about her perfect home office explicates the niceties that made her work-from-home life much more bearable. And readers gave up their own tips, like keeping the printer away from the computer (enforced away-from-screen breaks), and making the trash can and shredder as universally accessible as possible (clutter killers).

7. Install a worthy whiteboard

Even if you're a total computer obsessive, having a space to leave must-notice reminders and sketch out your thoughts. If the tiny-but-affordable models at your local office store don't do it for you, or you want something a bit more personalized, think outside the wood-framed white. A glass version isn't quite as high-contrast readable, but certainly durable and might work against a white wall. You could also grab some stick-on, removable dry erase sheets for those moments of fleeting big-picture inspiration. Know a supposedly busted erase board about to hit the curb? Draw over the permanent marker or stuck-on erasable ink with another dry-erase marker, wipe it away, and you might be good as new. Need just a little reusable note space? Grab a CD "jewel" case and put one together. Anywhere you've got a vertical surface, you can make a magnetic-backed whiteboard with two coats of paint you can pick up at Home Depot.

6. Rescue your filing cabinet

It seems like everyone over a certain age has a file cabinet of some sorts, but so many of them end up as supplemental shelf space cluttered with paper, and sometimes even the paper you would file inside it. That's a pretty clear sign that something's gone awry with your filing system. Gina rescued her own cabinet with better labels and a re-thinking of its purpose and use. The Simple Dollar helps out those who mostly use their cabinet for financial backup with the best document organizing system. And if you're the type to pull a folder and let it hang around, shame yourself into returning it by bookmarking its absence. Need something more, well, file-geeky? Try our complete filing cabinet page.

5. Charge and stash your gadgets away

Remember when one power strip was all you needed for everything electronic in your life? Yeah, we do too, and still wish the Bills had won that Super Bowl. But these days, your cell phone, camera battery, iPod, work phone, laptop battery, and other gear require both space and voltage. Keeping them off your desk space, yet still easily found and charged, is easy to accomplish. You can simply convert a cheap bedside table or soften up a simple box, or get fancy by adding switches or automatic lighting. If you've just got one or two things to keep handy but out of the way, a wall-mounted charger, made from an empty lotion bottle, no less, might be all you need. Here's a video showing one of our (and our readers') favorites, the IKEA-purchased charger box:

4. Keep wires out of sight

The entirely wireless workspace can be a reality, but not everybody's upgraded every single component in their work life to Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Plus, non-iMac monitors will be wired into the immediate future. It's really cheap and not at all handyman-level to get wireless, either. Adam did it in 2006, Gina did a 2007 redux, and we've revisited the gear and guidelines a few times since. You can get to cordless simplicity with clamps, geek out over a concealed surge protector. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, but the project is almost always worth the two-lattes-at-Starbucks price of entry.

3. Make it easy on your eyes, arms, and ... seat

Your body didn't evolve over 200,000 years to sit at a desk and use a computer eight-ish hours per day. The best you can do is try and lessen the impact of a modern work day on the parts that get the most taxed. The Ergotron site has a really helpful ergonomic workspace planner that provides ideal heights for desks, chairs, monitors, and other office components, along with a workspace assessment to see how your current setup holds out under stress tests. If that's all too much, simply move your monitors to just below eye level, as Reader's Digest suggests. If you're really keen on getting away from the standard office routine, gather up the tools and build your own standing desk space.

2. Get a label maker—the lightsaber of organization

Next time you feel the deep, strong need to run out and buy another plastic box for your stuff, ask yourself if you couldn't get just as far by putting a new label on a box you already have. That's the key to a label maker—it lets you design an organization system from your own work flow, not the other way 'round. We've previously revealed our crush on the Brother P-touch Home and Hobby model, but our label-loving readers have a few other recommendations, too.

1. Keep it clean

Sounds easy at first glance, doesn't it? Buy some stacking inboxes, put the coffee mugs away when you're done with them, and file everything you're not working on away. Boy, don't we wish. Our own Jason totally remade his entire home office space, from floors to walls, using a number of tried and tested organization and physical re-arrangements. I have only a single desk to manage, but found it cluttered enough to clean it and keep it that way, mostly by banishing my "junk drawer" and maximizing the horizontal real estate on it. However you tackle your decluttering project, pick something that sticks, and which makes putting things away take no more time than throwing something out. Photo by frischmilch.

What makes your home office a great place to work? How do you keep it both comfortable and productive? What productivity problems do you need to tackle in your setup? We want to hear it all in the comments.

Small business and home business ideas and advice on marketing, employees, and client. Business Profile: Table Top Trends Read how one person turned her love of Works. Piece of Advice for Home Office/Workspace: Invest in a comfortable in My top piece of advice to setting up an office that many people don't know yet.

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Save Your Back with a DIY Standing Desk

Save Your Back with a DIY Standing Desk WebWorkerDaily writer Mark Hinton decided he wanted a standing desk as a workplace back-up, so he could move between sitting and standing throughout his day when his back needed a break. He opted to build his own for several reasons: he could build it the exact size and height he wanted, it was cheaper to build it himself, and he wanted a desk he could take apart easily when he was inspired to rearrange his office. The construction required only a simple 2x4 frame with a plywood top.

A standing desk is a great alternative to spending all day hunched in your chair . Today's featured workspace is a standing desk with ample space. For the past few months I have had incredible back pain that has led to many trips to the chiropractor. A growing body of research shows just how rough sitting all day is on our bodies . Where can I get a simple, affordable, adjustable standing desk? includes some do -it-yourself stand-up desk ideas.

For the desktop, I chose a high-quality plywood sheet 4 feet by 8 feet, cut in half at the store. When I cut off one corner to create the front of the desk, my old saw mangled the edge of the wood. The rough edge of the wood led me to buy a couple of yards of soft vinyl at a fabric store to cover the wood. The result is a very nice work surface.

The vinyl probably has just enough give to make writing on it pleasant, which makes it a nice addition even if there's no rough edges. If you're not opposed to whipping up some 2x4 legs, but you're not too keen on a plywood desk, check out this standing desk made from an Ikea coffee table. For more standing desk ideas, make sure to check out some of the really great reader submissions we've received over the years, like the Treadputer, a treadmill/standing desk hybrid, and the adjustable height standing desk, which puts both desk elevations in the same space. If you have a standing desk, or just a few experiences with one, sounds off in the comments below.

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Best and Perfect Home Office

Best and Perfect Home Office ? BY the time I started looking for someone to help me organize my home office, where I work when I’m not out reporting stories, it was not a pretty sight: notebooks, papers, bills, cellphone chargers, books, digital cameras and tape recorders, batteries, stamps, magazines, Sweet’n Low and Splenda packets (where did they come from?) were piling up on my desk, the floor and the filing cabinet. Best and Perfect Home Office Whatever kind of work you do at home, your office is one place you want to spend the time to make comfortable and convenient

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Noah Woods

CLEANUP The author’s home office went from chaos to order after the intervention of Lisa Whited, an interior designer. Clutter reigns, and storage space is improperly used.

I found a few professional organizers on the Web and made some calls, without much success. One woman charged a minimum of $250 an hour (because, she said, “I can get it”); another suggested I consider going paperless, putting everything on the computer (not an option, in my mind).

Then one day Liz, the daughter of my longtime boyfriend, Lou Ureneck, came to visit us in our small two-bedroom apartment in Brookline, Mass. Liz, a struggling actress in New York who pays the rent with odd jobs — waitress, party caterer, freelance cupcake baker — hadn’t spent much time with us before, but I quickly noticed her extreme tidiness.

When she went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, she never left the box of tea bags out for more than a minute; the used tea bag would disappear instantly into the garbage. And then, since she was already in there, she’d just clean everything, washing the dishes Lou and I had left in the sink, unloading the dishwasher, scrubbing down the counters for good measure.

I tried to thank her, but she shrugged it off. It was the just way she was.

I was awed, I was grateful. Liz was the one.

“Liz,” I said, leading her into my office, which was also the guest room in which she was staying, “do you think you might be able to help me with this?”

Within two days, she had waded through everything, consulting with me over what to toss and what to file under which category. We came up with dozens — Education Story Ideas, Bills, Manny Ramírez, Poems I Love, Expense Receipts, Letters from Mom and Dad — and she created a place for each, writing the headings onto manila folders that she dropped into hanging files in the double-wide, teak-finish filing cabinet I had bought at Ikea five years earlier, but had never made much use of.

After Liz went back to New York, some friends came to dinner. I raved about her wizardry with the filing cabinet and bragged that she had brought me to a higher state of organization. I was thrilled with this fresh start, and wanted to share my excitement.

“I did that once,” said one of the men at the table, a computer consultant, with a skeptical tone in his voice. “I got everything put away. And I never opened the filing cabinet again.”

“That,” I said serenely, “won’t happen to me.”

A few months later, it had. The cabinet was again serving mainly as a place to put notebooks, scraps of paper and letters I was planning to file tomorrow. The clutter had not only returned but multiplied. I was back to where I’d started, or worse.

I wasn’t alone. In the last decade, as our personal and work lives have become more frenetic, books by organizing gurus like Julie Morgenstern, Peter Walsh and David Allen have packed the best-seller list, and magazines like O and Real Simple have spent tens of thousands of words on the subject. The professional organizing business has grown exponentially (as evidenced, for example, by a 400-percent increase in the membership of the National Association of Professional Organizers since 1999).

Now, as unemployment is on the rise and freelance work and part-time jobs are replacing many full-time ones, more of us are spending more time in home offices (or in the tiny nooks that often pass for them). We may be spending less on furnishing them, but the demand for ways to make these spaces make sense has probably never been higher.

“People are overwhelmed,” said Nancy Black, a professional organizer in Beverly, Mass., for 26 years. “They’re trying to work 24-7. All you can do is help them figure out how to make their environment work best for them.”

But as serial readers of books on this subject learn — and as I learned after Liz’s masterful filing job — organization is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. Just as people’s differing appetites, metabolisms and capacities for exercise mean that a given diet will work well for some, not at all for others, differences in work styles can run deep, and often call for customized approaches to the home office. And yet, the experts say, few of us take (or even believe we have) the time to figure out how we really work, or what kind of system is likely to work for us.

Which is why Lisa Whited, an interior designer who specializes in adapting work spaces to the needs, habits and goals of their users, began our relationship — one that would end up changing my life — with an interview.

Erik Jacobs for The New York Times After hanging shelves, Ms. Whited starts sorting.

I’d found Ms. Whited through Lou’s brother, Paul Ureneck, who lives near her in Maine, about two months after the papers in my office started piling up again. Although she was based in Portland, more than 100 miles north of our apartment, she came highly recommended, agreed to do the whole project for a fee under $500 and was already making the commute down to the Boston area for another job. (I wasn’t organized enough to think of writing about the experience until later, of course.)

THE interview started on the phone before we met, and continued into her first visit. Was I right-handed or left-handed? Which side of the desk did I answer the phone on? How much office time did I spend on the computer? Did the printer work for me there, to the left of the computer where I had to reach for pages with my left hand?

What about all those reporter’s notebooks stacked up on the desk, or the files full of notes spread out across it? How did I use them: did I need them out and open while I was working?

And what about that filing cabinet against the wall — the one with the papers stacked on top of it? Was that working for me?

It was not, of course, and that was one of my biggest problems. I found it strangely challenging to open that drawer, and I kept wondering who’d invented those hanging file folders that spilled all my papers onto the floor when I pulled them out of the cabinet. On top of which, I had a strong resistance to putting anything back in the cabinet that I might need anytime soon.

Ms. Whited said I was the kind of person who needed to see things in front of me or else I forgot I had them. Apparently, I’m not alone.

“More and more people I see aren’t using their filing cabinets, except for archival material,” Ms. Whited said. “It works great for some people — they’re the clean desk people. They take just one thing out at a time. They can focus on one thing at a time. They can put it back in the filing cabinet and take out the next thing they need.”

What I needed, on the other hand, was a system that would allow me to see a lot of my papers and other materials at once, without the chaos of a paper-cluttered desk. To create this, Ms. Whited said, we’d have to make use of vertical space.

She suggested installing three long white Elfa shelves on the wall above my desk, to support the rectangular bins that she was proposing as my alternative to the filing cabinet. I had stumbled upon the bins myself, at the hardware store down the block, and was using the two I had bought to hold papers and reporter’s notebooks. That was crucial: They were big enough to hold both notebooks and papers — filed in manila folders, when I really wanted to be on top of things — but not so big that stuff was lost inside. They were working for me.

Ms. Whited took my ad hoc efforts to the next level. I bought lot of bins, more than two dozen, in attractive shades of dark green and dark orange (I would have stuck to one color, as Ms. Whited advised, but the hardware store kept running out), dedicating each to a different category. I was a little worried about their price — $17 each, though I later found them at an art supply store for $15 — but I found that I loved having them there. I loved looking at them, all lined up within reach. They were like a map to all the interesting stuff in my work and private life, and they even made the uninteresting stuff — Bills, Expense Receipts — seem somehow pleasant.

The secret to this system was labeling the bins with category names, and for that, Ms. Whited told me, I would need a device that just about everyone whose work involves organizing seems to worship, the label maker. This battery-powered appliance, and the neatly printed black-and-white strips it churns out, gives off a hard-to-pinpoint but powerful vibe of organization, its advocates say, that even the neatest handwritten labels can’t match. “The labeler is a surprisingly critical tool in our work,” writes David Allen, the productivity consultant and efficiency expert, in his magnum opus, “Getting Things Done.”

Mr. Allen elaborated in a telephone interview, describing the process and rewards of label making in a fittingly telegraphic style. “You make a folder, you open it, you see the label, it’s done, ‘I’m a winner,’ ” he said.

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Ms. Whited came to the label maker a few years ago, when she had a major health scare, and one of her first worries was about her husband and three small children: “How is Pete going to know where everything is?”

Having worked with an organizer herself, she knew about label makers. She bought one, and began labeling the clear plastic bins she stored everything in. Children’s medicine. Adult medicine. Bread. Waffles (In a plastic bin in the freezer). Candy. Cat treats. All the stuff in the cellar: Caulking. Paint thinner. Linseed Oil.

The tests came back negative. She was going to live — but never again without a label maker.

If the label maker is the universal organizing tool, labels themselves are an entirely personal matter, Ms. Whited and other designers and organizers say.

“When someone says to me, ‘How should I label this,’ I say, ‘I can’t answer that for you,’ ” said Ms. Black, the organizer from Beverly. “‘Otherwise, when I leave, you’re not going to be able to find it.’ ” She does frown on one particular label, though: “Miscellaneous,” which she sees as a black hole of a category. “‘If you really want it, you can have it,’ ” she tells clients, ‘but don’t tell anyone I helped you with it.’ ”

Once I’d picked my category names, labeled the bins and arranged them on the shelves, the system immediately seemed to work: there were about 30 bins, enough to handle the full range of things I needed to stay on top of but few enough that I could scan all their labels closely in about a minute. And the bins were small enough that I didn’t need to be fussy about the organization within each one; I could stick forms, notes and other papers into them without worrying about their exact position and still feel confident that I’d be able to retrieve them quickly.

Systems often fail, Ms. Black said, because people trying to get organized put too much pressure on themselves to do it perfectly. And one thing that contributes to this problem, she believes, is the tendency of magazines to show “perfect people in their perfectly organized offices.”

“ ‘They cleaned it up for the photo shoot’ — I tell people that all the time,” she said. “There is no such thing as the perfect system. It’s a matter of what the person is comfortable with in trying to make it work.”

Ms. Black has a client who is a sales manager for a food company and spends much of his life on the road, visiting restaurants and taking orders. He has a fairly well-organized filing cabinet in his home office, but he also has a habit of writing down important information on little scraps of paper, and then, when he gets home, dumping the scraps into a mess of papers on his desk, which is in his dining room. Ms. Black did not try to push him to start using a notebook or some other neater system; she just encouraged him to start putting the little slips into variously marked “action” folders — “Hot Leads,” “Customer Group 1” — that he keeps in a single large file on his desktop.

As a designer, Ms. Whited can make larger-scale adaptations to her clients’ work styles, or at least try to. On a recent job at a law firm, she met a lawyer who covered his desk and floor with papers in the course of preparing a case. The firm had always furnished its offices with desks and credenzas, but Ms. Whited saw that these surfaces were not working for this lawyer, or others in the firm, and proposed replacing them with low shelves that would surround him as he worked, like a pilot in a cockpit, allowing him to reach whatever he needed. The senior partners wouldn’t give up the credenzas, although Ms. Whited made the case that her unorthodox approach would save the firm money by saving the lawyer’s time.

“It’s about using the space you have better, it’s not about making it bigger,” Ms. Whited said of both her proposal and her work generally.

In taking on my space, Ms. Whited took aesthetic considerations as seriously as organizational ones: We had already established that the look of the room mattered to me, and to my sense of well-being in working there, even if I couldn’t see all the problems she did. In cases like the floor lamp with no shade, just a naked bulb, she didn’t consult me. “That has to go,” she said, and she took it with her to the dump in Maine.

Artwork was a trickier issue. A large map of an Alaskan river hung over the futon, and though I had never liked it all that much, I knew it meant a lot to Lou, who has spent time there fishing and rafting with his son. I was reluctant even to think about moving it, but Ms. Whited persuaded me to talk to Lou about the possibility. He wasn’t overjoyed at first, but we found a prominent place for it in the entrance hall, and it was replaced in the office with photographs of Martha’s Vineyard, set off on another wall by some watercolors — a change that made the space feel more soothing.

Still, having a work space in a home requires compromise, especially when space is tight. Lou has an office at Boston University, where he teaches journalism, a 10-minute walk from our apartment. But he also writes books, and what writer wouldn’t like an office at home, or at least a desk, to use on weekends, or early mornings before work, or late at night?

AFTER four weeks of working with Ms. Whited, and $1,800 spent on designer’s fees, organizing materials and hardware and a new (used) Aeron chair, I felt so happy in my newly organized office that I wanted to share it with Lou. With everything put away, the space seemed vast. Why should I have all that space to myself? Come on in, Lou. He set up an old desk against the wall next to the futon sofa, diagonally from mine.

He did what regular people tend to do at their desks: Talked on the phone in a voice above a whisper. Tapped at his computer. Directed occasional comments to the other person in the room. I did my best not to snap. And then he did one semi-weird thing: Lou is a fly fisherman, and one night he came into the office and began attaching some sort of vise to the side of his desk. It made a really loud clanking noise. Oh, that, he said. It’s a fly-tying vise. So when he wanted a break from writing, he could sit there and tie flies.

Goodbye, Lou. He was understanding. Eventually, he started using the dining room table as an auxiliary desk, or sitting on the living room sofa with his laptop.

Often, however, the home office has to be shared. Nancy Black has a client, a woman who is the chief executive of a small company and works out of a small room in her house. Her husband is an economist with an outside office, but he also runs a photography business from a desk next to his wife’s. He is, Ms. Black said diplomatically, not as neat and organized as his wife.

“The challenge there was to help her organize her part of the room so that it works for her — and to accept the fact that he’s not going to put away things neatly,” Ms. Black said. “You pick your battles.”

Her solution: Use the open shelving in the room for large bins where the husband could throw his things. “All she sees are bins,” Ms. Black said. Ideally, she added, there would be enough space so the husband could have his desk in a separate room. But “a lot of people with home offices do not have an ideal world.”

Then again, exposure to the not-yet-organized may not be entirely bad for those of us who’ve crossed over. There is such a thing, after all, as too much organization.

Last Wednesday, Ms. Whited’s 11-year-old daughter, Claire, who is in fifth grade, started looking around for her science homework. She had worked on it for days, filling one side of a white sheet of paper with more than a dozen colored drawings of liquids, solids and gases. She was sure she had left it face down on the dining room table, where her younger brothers like to color.

“My heart sank when she said it was right there on the table,” Ms. Whited said.

Claire was close to tears. “I kept saying, ‘I am so sorry, I am just so sorry,’ ” Ms. Whited said. “ ‘What can I do?’ She said I could write a letter to her teacher.”

So Ms. Whited sat down and explained, in a handwritten note: No, the dog did not eat Claire’s homework. Her mother, on one of her regular sweeps through the dining room, had recycled it. Pickup was on Tuesday.

Ahh, Breathing Room

Tips from Lisa Whited, an interior designer who specializes in adapting work spaces to her clients’ particular needs and habits.

• The No. 1 rule is clear out the clutter. Get rid of broken things that you won’t ever get around to fixing. Karen Kingston’s book “Clear Your Clutter With Feng Shui” is a helpful guide.

• Color can help make a small or confined space feel more livable, and paint is the cheapest way to get it. “I painted the walls of my home office — a five-by-seven-foot, windowless walk-in closet — yellow,” Ms. Whited said. “I like yellow, and we had leftover cans of Behr’s Cornmeal in the basement.”

• Lighting is important: beyond a room’s general illumination, which could be overhead lighting, you can use task lighting, to work at your desk, and accent lighting, like a hanging light, to create an inviting space.

• Choose containers that are an appropriate size to hold what you’re putting in them. They don’t need to be fancy, but if they are going to be visible, they should at least look similar, so the space looks more organized.

• Get the best chair you can afford. “It’s like your bed,” Ms. Whited said. “You spend a ton of time in it.”

• Always have extras of whatever you usually run out of on hand. “I have at least one extra printer cartridge,” she said, “two reams of paper, staples, tape, etc.”

• Don’t dismiss the importance of candles, flowers, a great piece of art — whatever inspires you. It all helps.

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Total Home Office Makeover

When my messy home office got so cluttered I couldn't get anything done in it, it was time to take action—and I turned to IHD for advice. Disorganization leads to lack of free time, lack of free time leads to believing you'll never be able to get it all under control again, and that is how I ended up as a terribly scattered person in a wretchedly cluttered office. The responsibilities of adulthood, marriage, and parenthood forced me to admit the haphazard approach to life that colored my college years wasn't going to cut it anymore. Total Home Office Makeover

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In the following makeover confessional, check out the tips and tricks I gleaned from IHD to transform my mountain of clutter into fuel for a productivity machine.

The first thing I had to do before I so much as cleared off my cluttered desk was admit that what I had previously called getting organized was actually just cleaning. When the organization bug would bite, I'd tear apart my office and spend a whole weekend thinking "This is it! I'm getting organized!" only to find that the next week led to a big pile of mess. I had no system for dealing with anything: paperwork, incoming projects, digital files, not a thing. I had to sit down and adopt the mindset of an unclutterer. All the calendars, planners, and containers didn't help one bit until I took control of my environment.

Once I had committed myself to not just cleaning my space but to taking control of it and directing how things would be coming in and out of my office, I felt comfortable taking absolutely everything out. By starting with an empty room I had a blank slate to lay out my office in a more sensible manner. My goal was to let only the most critical and functional things back into my workspace.

The secondary desk—which had previously served as a clutter landing pad—became my primary and only desk. My previous corner computer desk had little room for anything besides the computer, certainly not enough room to work effectively. Taking a cue from the long respected door-as-desk school, my desk was simply a big white door on top of two file cabinets.

The poor file cabinets had been little more than dumpsters. When I was overwhelmed by the mess on my desk, I'd often just round up the pile and dump it in one of the file drawers to sort them at some later date. When I emptied the office to start from scratch, I emptied the file cabinets too. I had read tons of recommendations for label makers and ended up with two: a Dymo handheld one for using around the house and a Brother attached to the computer via USB Flash Drive . Armed with a label maker, I did my own version of an extreme file cabinet makeover. I sorted and filed all the paperwork I had gathered up when I took apart the office. I recycled or shredded all the waste according to this paper shredding guide. Two of the drawers now house neatly organized files, and the other two drawers split duty storing frequently used office supplies and blank media.

As any geek knows, placing the desk is only a fraction of the effort behind setting up a computer workspace. I had to wire everything together and keep it from looking like a ball of twine in the process. Impressed with Adam's wire wrangling, I attached a wire cord management rack to the bottom of the desk and used it to keep cabling off the floor. Displeased with how much space the computer took up sitting on my previous desk, I moved the tower under the desk and tucked it out of the way behind the file cabinet. Behind the file cabinet I hooked up an APC battery power supply, so I can work through power interruptions. The only other thing on the floor is my sound system's sub woofer and a wire waste basket.

At this point I already had the toolbox out and it didn't seem like much of a leap to extend my office renovation to my home network. At the time my Xbox Media Center and office computer were suffering on the wireless spectrum. Armed with a spool cable and tools, I wired my own home network which did wonders for the video streaming from the office to the Xbox. By repurposing some 1950s era steel stacking letter trays as a DIY network rack I extended the cable management from beneath the desk all the way to my modest network node in the basement.

I attacked the dark and claustrophobic feeling of the office on two fronts. To increase the sense of space and decrease the feeling that I was staring at a wall, I hung a mirror the length of my workspace, over my desk which created a welcome illusion of additional space and light. It is also more comfortable to be able to see what is behind you instead of feeling trapped against the wall.

Prior to the makeover I had never installed proper window coverings. I had simply taken big utility clips and thrown a backdrop cloth over the windows. Because it was such a hassle to take down, I simply worked in an office with no natural light. I found a fantastic $15 tension wire curtain rod at Ikea, which was long enough to cover both windows and the glass doors. Gina's tension wire photo wall design can be easily modified to hold up curtains as a DIY version of the Ikea model. I punched grommets in a dark cloth I had handy and strung the tension wire through grommets to create a light weight curtain that was dark enough to dim the room properly when I was editing photos.

The original office, despite the appearance of having every piece of clutter and hardware under the sun, had no functional task lighting. The office's only light was low watt decorative wall sconces. They were bright enough to work under without a flashlight, but so dim that my eyes were frequently strained. I wanted to set up bias lighting to relieve the strain, but putting the mirror behind the desk required I modify the suggestion to put a compact fluorescent directly behind the monitor.

Inspired by Gina's father-in-law's use of tube lighting in his pantry, I attached a length of LED tube Christmas lights to the underside of the desk. The LED lights simultaneously provide bias lighting, keyboard illumination, and nice diffuse ambient light all from a single source. For hand writing and general tasks at the desk, lighting is provided by a simple chrome halogen desk lamp.

As the upgraded lighting demonstrates, the new desk arrangement places more emphasis on health and ergonomics. The cramped desk and poor layout of the old office had been turning me into the Hunchback of Coder Dame. The keyboard now sits on an adjustable slide out tray, acquired for its extra long width. Along with the keyboard, there is a trackball mouse and a control module for the sound system. Except for the monitors and tower power buttons, all physical input to the computer happens within the 18-inch span of the keyboard tray.

Placing the tower out of immediate reach only had one downside: no easy access to the front USB ports I use frequently. So, on the left hand side of the keyboard, I mounted a mini laptop-style USB hub to the bottom of the desk with mounting tape. Now, frequent memory card swapping and flash drive syncing is no sweat. Total Home Office Makeover

In the old office, every peripheral and gadget in need of charging ended up piled on the desk or balanced precariously on top of the computer tower. I took the idea of the DIY charging station to another level by using a wire shelf to hold and organize the chargers for my iPod, DSLRs, camcorder, phone, as well as my printer, scanner, external DVD burner, external hard drive, label makers, and two small plastic organizer drawers for miscellaneous office supplies and printer paper. The open design of the wire shelving makes it super easy to place cords right where I want them and the large surface area of the top shelf makes a great landing strip. At the end of the day I can set my attache beside the station, and small things like phone and keys atop it.

To bridge the distance between the tower and the charging station I used a 10 foot USB extension. I took a slightly less involved approach to hiding cables in the baseboards and opted to use some of the left over clips from the LED Christmas lights to secure the white USB extension cable against the bottom of the white window frame. The cord is nearly invisible. Total Home Office Makeover

My second monitor is one of my favorite additions to the made-over workspace. I acquired both the monitor and a spare video card from the estate of my grandfather. A lifelong engineer and avid computer hobbyist who taught me how to program, it was only fitting to take the spare parts from his lab and incorporate them into my new space. I cannot say enough good things about the how much using dual monitors has boosted my productivity.

Finally, it isn't truly yours until you personalize your workspace. Since 1994—for reasons I can't entirely recall—a first edition Spawn action figure has sat on my computer, keeping the digital gremlins at bay. Since 2006, my first Father's Day gift sits in the window and reminds me what I'm working so hard for. Finally, the only kind of clutter I can stand, the cute little things my daughter brings to the office as presents, like dozens of Curious George stickers.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how through an extreme office makeover, I went from sitting around reading about everyone's awesomely organized and zen offices, to finally having one of my own complete with swanky cord basket.

If you enjoyed this post I’m pretty sure you’ll also like these:

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2. 15 Interesting and Creative Offices by Tech Companies
3. Top 10 Best in Small Space Home Tech
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5. 10 Creative and Cool Workplaces

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Top 10 Best in Small Space Home Tech

Whether it's a minuscule Austin studio apartment, a slightly more spacious Boston pad, or a still modest duplex for a family in New York, there are plenty of inspiring, smart examples of tech working together with home decor from our Apartment Therapy house tour archives. Home offices, hidden laundry rooms, a crafty home closet studio space…even a home entertainment room from one of our own contributors here at IHD…they're all from modest, if not quite small, real world spaces we're highlighting below.

Brian's Nest in the Clouds: Brian's bedroom home office is not only light filled and well coordinated, but also exhibits as a great example of how to use a shallow work surface for tight spaces. Having a flat panel computer like the an iMac doesn't hurt.

Naseem's Back Bay Live/Work Space: this is as light-filled as a home office can get; we like how Naseem has placed his desk looking into the room as focal point, though we expect he utilizes those window shades during the day. And note how he's hidden his cable/wire mess in a plastic below his desk!

Andrea & Chad's Venice Abode: Rapper Nelly might have once asked to see them grills, but with some speakers, taking off the grill cover can reveal a splash of decor-complementary colours. Andrea & Chad's hid away a few of their slimmer home entertainment components underneath the credenza, keeping the top surface nicely organized.

Julie's Cozy & Vibrant Revisited: don't have a dedicated laundry room space or garage to wash your duds? Julie's apartment is just 410 square feet, but she maximized utility by storing a stackable washer and dryer in her walk-in closet. We're envious and impressed!

Kim's Personalized Mount Pleasant Flat: we're all about utilizing vertical space and this DC resident has worked her way on up with wall mounted shelving and a small glass table as her desk. Mix and match!

Dave's Tiny Urban Austin Studio: when you call 392 square feet home, a desk can seem like a luxury. Dave's setup is all about being compact and organized, right down to his abbreviated wireless keyboard.

Dale & Adam's Detailed Duplex: tiny wall-mounted speakers, a flat panel and Apple TV are the foundation for this home theater setup hailing from Chelsea. We especially like the dimming overhead lights, which give the room a theater-like appearance.

The Trover's Temporary Pre-Designed Pad: guess which one of our Unplggd team writers lives in this toy and tech filled Kansas City loft? And check out the home entertainment center they adopted when they moved in.

Leticia & Daniel's Vintage Cool Condo: sometimes you just want to contain your tech into the smallest space you can, and this Toronto couple cages in their setup in an all metal shelving unit. Since all the components are black, the setup works as a cohesive unit instead of a disparate setup (turn your speakers sideways, if they're small enough).

Steven & Meredith's Modern Mix: home offices or crafting spaces can be hidden away into a closet; empty it out your catch-all junk closet and put it to better use by adding a closet-size friendly desk inside.

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Most Beautiful Homes : Louisiana Greek Revival

Here's a home that swells with southern pride, built by one of the south's premier architects, A. Hays Town. This beautiful wood house design consists of a main house, a studio/garage, a boat storage shed and a boathouse with integrated water. This beautiful Craftsman design features all the things that make a house a home. Design Tags: luxurious beautiful small warm homes with interior decoration pics, kid decoration, colonial beach house plan. Looking for the house that has it all?

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Home Design | Furniture | Interior | Exterior | Office | Kitchen | Garden

This Louisiana house is an eclectic mix of Cajun, Creole, Spanish and French Colonial design. With its raised front porch steps and French doors with full-length shutters, the home fuses Cajun cottage elements with Creole architecture. The facade's wide porches and simple columns are a nod to the Greek revival mansions of the 19th century that were favored by wealthy southerners. Beautiful home deserves a grand entrance that lives up to the promise inside. ... Home design software helps you arrange furniture, layout a floor plan. A beautiful house on a hill by interior design architects McGlashan Architecture. This house integrates into the topography of the hill it's built on.

Inside, Town designed a home of grand scale overflowing with southern charm. The rich, warm patina on the furnishings and accessories in the living room keeps the formality in check. Beautiful Home Interiors above the Beach - Kitchen Design Picture. Beautiful Home Interiors above the Beach - Living Room Picture.

The master suite is the utmost in elegance with sparkling accessories amid a sea of shimmery blue-gray fabrics. The bed commands full attention upon entering the room.

Beautiful Simple Family House with Amazing Panoramic View Every one would like to have a dreamed home like this simple house design. Beautiful Cooper Residence by Randy Weinstein Design Randy Weinstein Design has built a new industrial style home. Simply Beautiful Home and Garden Design provides landscaping and home interior design. We are based in Carroll County, Maryland. To fill the floor space in your home, you might consider buying Cheap Contemporary Area Rugs.

Tags: bedroom interior design, beds, Great Headboards, headboards, home, House Beautiful, Interior, Interior Design, luxury, room apartment,

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