Spent the last 4 days cleaning out my old study.
I used the study originally to prepare stuff for uni but it was also where my son and I had set up 3 desks back in the early nineties and at one stage we had 5 or was it 6 computers running in there - it got quite hot there in summer.
By 2002 the house had an Ethernet network so son moved his PCs out to his room and I was down to 2 PCs and a laptop so I cleaned the whole study out and made and installed a large U shaped desk made out of 3 jarrah slabs (2.3 x 3.3 x 1.8) x ~800mm wide x 42 mm thick. A few months after that we set up a wireless network and I migrated to the dining room/lounge/family room with my laptop and for the next 15 years worked anywhere but in the study so it has hardly been used except as a place to store old PCs printers etc and crap.
Just prior to retiring from Uni ~ 4 years ago I did a partial clean out of the home study and got rid of 3 PCs and 6 boxes of books went to the Save the Children, but then promptly refilled the study with stuff I brought home from my uni office. When SWMBO retired last year she also added to the piles so all the surfaces were covered as well as the floor with less than 1 sqm of space to stand in.
This clean up had been hanging over me for some time time especially as SWMBO recently converted our lounge room into a sewing room and she started hinting at "when was I going to tackle the study?" The main reason for me not tackling it was I had better things to do and I was dreading the decisions that needed to be made. What I needed was a good reason to do it and that came up recently when I decide that doing electronics in the shed was getting more and more difficult as I didn't have room and I couldn't leave anything delicate in progress out on a bench etc. So I decided to clean the study out and set it up up as a space to work on electronics projects.
It turned out that leaving it for 4 years has made the decisions about what should be chucked out a lot easier (YAY! procrastination wins again) as most of it was beyond my caring.
During the clean up over the last few days I filled a wheelie bin with paper and took 5 cardboard boxes full of cardboard, books (mainly old computer manuals) and paper, plus an old PC, two printers, half a dozen laser printer cartridges, and two old LCD screens, an old VCR. off to recycling. I found my son's old Altech Lansing amp and speakers in a cupboard and it still works so I am all geared for music. :2tsup:
Its early days yet but there's enough space cleared to get down and fiddling.
The desk is still in good condition and I don't want to damage it so I have covered the central section with 1mm polycarbonate sheet and the the font section of that is covered in cork floor tiles.
The large macro photographic stand (I made that back in 2009?) provides excellent lighting.
I knocked up a bit of a stand for my Oscilloscope and soldering stations from some pieces of veneered MDF.
The large white box on the LHS contains a small 3D printer that I want to get going at some stage.
I've ordered some roll out tool drawers that will roll under the RHS of the desk.
What I'm working on at the moment is a series of small Arduino projects in preparation for the micro dust sensor that should be arriving any day now. I've dabbled with Arduino stuff before but once again nothing with a purpose so I never got that far. One of the first things I want to to do is build myself a new multi-gas sensor for my shed for when I run the forge. the sensors used to be expensive but now they cost <$2. Of course they need to be matched with a processor and out display device so that's where its at. My son is into this stuff and he gave me a bunch of stuff to play with until I work out what I need.
I've had to drag my old programming skills out of the back drawer part of the brain. I'm surprised how much is still there.
There a bunch more stuff to come up from the shed. A couple of small sets of drawers of components, and a rack to hold cables and connectors, although I might make a new one and keep the old rack for electrical stuff in the shed,
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