TL;DR so awesome, so much room for activities I should have done this years ago
This is such an exciting game-changing, lifestyle change! I moved my desk!
Ever since I moved in years ago into my small apartment my desk has always been in my bedroom, where in my place in Redmond it had been in a 2nd bedroom-turned-office. I think at the time I said I didn’t want the clutter of my desk in the living room, and I primarily used a laptop for everything, so to bedroom exile it went. Despite having my larger monitor(s) and an actual chair, I used my desktop setup less and less, only actually using it for doing photo imports. Even during COVID and the resulting work from home I continued to work from my couch and coffee table on laptops. I did not want to wake up, roll over to my computer, and stay in the same room all day long!
The problem was I wound up cluttering up a shelf and the corner of my living room anyways and all the computers made my bedroom hot in the summer, even with a window open. To the point I would turn off systems in ikeacluster and some nights sleep on the couch, where my A/C was located. It also turns out the cats’ litter boxes create a ton of clay dust so my electronics got absolutely filthy over time and required regular dust blasting and vacuuming.
I knew if I was going to continue to do any WFH I need to move my desk where it was usable and comfortable again. I procrastinated for months, dreading re-wiring everything, taking down my Internet connection, and having something inevitably failing during the process. Last week I finally sucked it up, took extra backups, moved the shelf into the bedroom and moved the desk and all the computers into the livingroom.
Before hooking everything up, I opened up the cases, stood in the doorway and gave them all a good air blasting. It kicked up so much dust I got three separate “smoke detected” warnings from my smoke detector! All of the hard drives survived, but the PSU in one of my Linux machines did smell like smoke and went to heaven when I flipped it on, as about I expected. Pro-tip: order spare power supplies for your weird size PC cases.
After getting everything back together, what a difference it made! I took out an Ikea chair I didn’t use, but it all freed up so much floor space in both the bedroom and livingroom! Somehow the new configuration just worked a lot better than I expected. I had room for an even bigger shelf in the bedroom which was satisfied by a trip to IKEA. The bedroom was immediately WAY cooler and dead silent now. The living room now gets noticeably warmer if I don’t have the balcony door open, but at least I have more options to deal with the heat and hopefully this means I don’t have to run my space heater so much in the winter. Now I’m getting around to adding some RGB rizz and vibes to the setup, because why not.
