- The No. 1 home office storage space
Forget about fancy desk dividers or expensive built-in shelves; the most important home office storage space under your roof is the hard drive of your computer. Your address book, diary, desk calendar and business card holder (not to mention pictures of your family) that seem to move around all over your desk will be immediately available in the most uncluttered way possible, if you spend time digitizing them.
- Turn a filing cabinet into a conference table base
Perhaps not the usual long table, but a round conference table that can seat two or three people and provide useful extra workspace. And the space between the tabletop and the floor won’t go to waste if you use a metal filing cabinet or an old bedside chest as a support. Use 9-mm plywood for the top and bolt it to the top of the cabinet. Then cover with a tablecloth that almost reaches the floor. Store rarely used files in the cabinets underneath so that you don’t have to crawl under the table too often.
- A secret filing cabinet
There’s no intrigue here — just a filing cabinet that looks like anything but what it is. What is it? A straw rectangular basket with a lid, something more often found in the living area than a home office. A basket with dimensions of roughly 45 x 45 x 22cm should accommodate around 30 files of average size or up to a dozen well-stuffed file folders. Placed under or beside your worktable, the basket is decorative as well as functional.
- Invest in a small safe
Store deeds, birth certificates, insurance information and passports in a fireproof safe that can be stowed on the top shelf of a wardrobe or bolted to the floor of a built-in. It may be out of sight, but it won’t be out of mind.
- Door-top bookshelf
When you run out of space for books, put a shelf in the space between the top of the door and the ceiling. If you have a spare piece of timber in your garage, you can make a shelf for the cost of the support brackets bought from a hardware shop. And a coat of paint on a sawn-to-size board will keep it from looking like a makeshift shelf.
- Keep paper-shredder blades sharp
Cutting aluminium foil will sharpen your scissors with ease and the shiny stuff will also do the same for the blades in your paper shredder. Lay a sheet of A4 paper on two sheets of heavy-duty aluminium foil as a cutting guide. Feed the sheets of foil through the shredder one at a time and the blades will get sharpened with minimal fuss.
- A good-looking noticeboard
A jungle of Post-it notes and envelopes and papers stuck to a noticeboard isn’t the prettiest sight to behold. So make your easy-to-reach ‘filing system’ more attractive by covering the board with felt and attaching ribbons to hold your stuff. Start by choosing felt in the colour of your choice. Then cut it 10cm larger than the board on all four sides, pull it taut over the board and staple the extra to the back. Use upholstery tacks to secure ribbons to the board, pulling them as taut as possible so that paper slipped behind the ribbons won’t fall through. You could crisscross the ribbons to create a diamond pattern over the whole board or position them to look like latticework — as long as it works well.
- A real vertical file
A vertical file is US business slang for a wastepaper basket. But there is another kind of vertical file that you can borrow from your child’s toy box which will keep mail, tickets and papers of similar size from cluttering up your workspace. What is it? A Slinky. Put it on your home-office desk and slide stray papers in between the wires.
- A business card album
A small, ring-bound photo album is ideal for keeping business cards in order. Simply slip a card or two in the protective plastic sleeves made for ring binders. With a ring binder to leaf through, your days of shuffling through a stack of cards for the one you need are over.
- An office in a cupboard
If you’re short of space but desperately need a home office, turn a spare under-stairs cupboard into your workspace. Remove the doors, attach a thick plank of plywood from one inside wall to the other as a desk; use any upper shelves in the cupboard to store less frequently used items such as a dictionary, extra stationery and your computer, or attach more plywood shelving if necessary. Slip a low filing cabinet under the ‘desk’, add a lamp and you’ll have a useful space to work in.
- Keep documents in a scrapbook
Scrapbooks equipped with plastic sleeves or pockets are ideal for keeping business contracts and other documents in order.
Credit: Reader’s Digest
Picture Credit: Google
