By Katherine Salant
This is the first part of a two-part series. Continue to Part 2.
Where are you planning to spend the most money in your new house? Most likely it's the to-die-for kitchen with all the bells and whistles you can afford.
But if you're one of the millions of Americans who now work from home, your first priority should be your home office. Regardless of what the real estate agent is saying about resale value, the space where you're going to be working many hours every day should be tailored to your needs and make you feel good. The money you spend may not be realized when you sell your house, but you should think of it as an investment in yourself and your business.
Aesthetic upgrades in your home office can, in fact, affect your own bottom line and potentially pay for themselves many times over. If your home office makes you feel good every time you look at it, you'll find that it is easier to turn out the work product and you can do it more quickly. And you will be looking at your office landscape many times everyday - whenever you're on the phone, wracking your brain for the perfect phrase or just taking a short break.
You'll reap further benefits from your home office if it's designed so that you can work more efficiently because this will help you to work more productively. An efficiently organized office means having all your computer equipment, supplies, and reference materials close at hand. You'll merely reach for what you need instead of having to cross the room every time you use the printer or get frequently used reference materials. Your office will also be neater because you're more likely to put things away if you don't have to get up out of your chair to do it.
Factoring your working style and work requirements into the planning will also increase your comfort level in your new office. For example, if you tend to sprawl across a desk area when you're reading or writing or you need to spread out papers, photographs or drawings, you'll want a sizeable desk area. If you do everything on a computer, you won't need as much room.
Who can help you figure all this out? A certified kitchen designer with experience in home offices is your best bet. Kitchens, like home offices, are very task oriented spaces. Kitchen and bath cabinetry is easily adapted to home office use, and most cabinetmakers offer two drawer file cabinets and bookcases.
All cabinetry is not equally adaptable, however. A home office workstation with everything close at hand means that the cabinets holding everything will also be close at hand. While you're working, you'll want to keep the cabinet doors open. To avoid their banging into each other or your shins, you'll need pocket doors, said Jim Bingnear, a certified kitchen designer in McLean, Va. These are not generally available in stock cabinet lines, so you'll likely need to upgrade to a semi-custom cabinetmaker.
Another consideration in cabinet choices is indoor air quality, an important issue when buying a new house. To save energy and avoid heating and cooling the great outdoors, builders have systematically plugged up air leaks in the building envelope. As a result, houses have less fresh air. At the same time, building materials and furnishings are increasingly made with synthetic materials containing unstable, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that "off gas" into the air. Of the hundreds that have been identified, the one drawing the most concern is formaldehyde, a potent eye and nose irritant that can cause respiratory problems. It has been classified by the World Health Organization as a confirmed human carcinogen.
Kitchen cabinets are frequently constructed of veneered particleboard that contains urea formaldehyde as a binder. The amount has been greatly reduced over the last fifteen years. Moreover, the rate of off-gassing is highest initially and then declines to a slow and steady pace that can continue for months and even years. In a kitchen, which is a large space that often has no doors and where you spend only a few hours a day, the cabinets are not usually an issue. But a home office is usually a small space where you will be working many hours everyday with the door closed to shut out household noise.
For this reason you might consider cabinetry that is very low or formaldehyde free. Canadian-based Neff Kitchens (www.neffkitchens.com) makes cabinets with marine plywood and a phenol formaldehyde binder that off-gases at a much lower rate than a urea formaldehyde binder. Neil Kelly Cabinets in Portland, Ore., (www.neilkellycabinets.com) makes cabinets with veneered wheat-board that is made from crop straw residues, and the board is formaldehyde free. The cabinets are sold by authorized dealers around the country. Two other cabinet companies also make formaldehyde-free wheat-board cabinets: Forefront Designs in Springfield, Ore., (www.forefrontdesigns.com; the cabinet line is Greenline) and Cabinet King in Brookpark, Ohio (www.cabinetking.com; the cabinet line is Greenleaf). Forefront works primarily in the commercial and institutional sectors, but occasionally does residential work. Cabinet King makes semi-custom, ready to assemble (RTA) cabinets and will ship them anywhere in the U.S. Dave Rudd, the owner, who has worked in the cabinet making and installing business for 25 years, said he switched to formaldehyde free cabinetry because he was "sick of being sick at work." All four companies use glues and finishes that have very low to no VOCs.
Moving from the general to the specific, what might a home office built with standard kitchen and bath cabinetry look like?
You can customize it to a remarkable degree, said Bingnear, because you can move the pieces around until you get a setup that's exactly right for you. For example, you might start with two vanity-height base cabinets and a desktop. Your computer monitor would be centered above a knee space where you would sit. On one side would be a base cabinet for your computer tower (CPU) on the other a base cabinet with roll-out shelves for your printer and office supplies.
But suppose you also need file drawers. Then you put the cabinets for the CPU and printer on the same side and a base with two file drawers on the other. Some people want their printer on their desktop. You can leave it out in the open, but Rhonda Knoche, a certified kitchen designer in Portland, Ore., suggested a neater solution: Put the printer in an appliance garage with a roll-top tamber door that slides up and down.
How wide do you want your knee space to be? It's usually 30 inches, but if you tend to sprawl over the work surface you might want 36 inches or even more. If you want a more open feel, you can group the cabinets holding your CPU and printer on one side and have the other end of your desktop supported by legs.
Perhaps you'd prefer to have your desk area and your computer work area completely separated. In that case, Knoche suggested a galley-type arrangement with the computer work station facing one wall, and a large desk area opposite it that faces into the room. To go from one to the other, you simply swivel your chair. The desk piece can match the computer station or, to give the room a more spacious and less formal look, it can be a large table.
How about desktop materials? You can use wood to match the cabinets, but it will scratch and get dinged up. If you don't want a "patina of age and use" look, Bingnear suggested plastic laminate, which has a harder surface and is more scratch-resistant. For a more upscale look, you can edge-band it with wood to match the cabinets. You may have your heart set on stone like granite or a solid surface material like Silestone, but Knoche cautioned that these are about four times the price of laminate and for some people they are cold to the touch. Before you commit yourself to one, make sure that you are comfortable with it because you will have much more body contact with your desktop than you will with a kitchen counter.
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