“Where are you?” is the first question that I am always asked when someone has a conference call with me. After more than a year, I still don’t have a one-line answer that I feel is immediately comprehensible. The response I give is some version of “in my backyard”, but I usually need to give some explanation of what that actually means.

Here is my attempt at documenting my journey of creating a unique workplace for myself.

The Golden Years of My Home Office

During the pandemic, my wife and I moved out of our tiny 1-bedroom apartment in the Marina neighborhood of San Francisco and into a palatial (read 2-bedroom) condo in the suburbs of Marin.

Our new home had it all: an attached two car garage, a backyard with room for an herb garden and a hot tub, and even a doggy door for Peanut. Best of all, I had my own home office. This was a major upgrade from working at a desk in the living room of our apartment. I had been working remotely even before the pandemic, but the obscene cost of renting in the city meant we were already paying an arm and a leg for our 1-bedroom apartment, and a bigger place was out of the question. Now I had my own office, with a door to shut out distractions, a window to gaze out when thinking, a bookshelf of technical references, and a couch to rest on. At the end of the day, I could close the door and mentally leave work behind, something that was much harder to do when my desk was right in the middle of our living room and I could always see a Slack notification slide by while making dinner or watching TV.

But the golden days of having my own office were numbered. We knew we wanted a kid and that would force me out of the office when it became the nursery. The plan had always been that I would take over Emily’s desk in the living room when she returned to in-office work, but as the pandemic years dragged on she ended up working from home most days. Stealing her desk was no longer going to be a feasible option.

A wild pod appears

Nurx was headquartered in San Francisco, but the large office was rarely used during the pandemic. It was in a terrible neighborhood, and the vast space was regularly used by only one or two employees. The landlord was giving the company a great rate on it because it was so hard to find tenants, but eventually the company decided to fully shutter the SF office to save money.

Before selling everything to a professional liquidator, the company offered items for sale to the employees. Local employees were able to buy extra laptops and monitors at a reasonable price. Among the other typical office equipment like desk chairs and printers, the company was also listing its four conference pods. These conference pods were like large phone booths, intended for employees to be able to have private conversations, such as 1:1 meetings with managers or conference calls that required less background noise. I ended up working from the pods quite often, because it was easier to focus in than the noisy and distracting open-air office plan.

So when I saw that the pods were up for sale, I immediately started to think about whether one could serve as the basis for a home office. The company was trying to liquidate the office within a couple of weeks, so I didn’t have long to make a decision.

There were a bunch of questions that I was going to have to think through including:

• How would I even move such a pod?
• Would it be something that I could actually work from for 8 hours a day?
• How much would it cost?
• Where would I put it at home?

I started with the easiest question which was “how much was this going to cost me?”. The company was selling the pods for $3,500 each. Pricey, but less than the 7-8k that office supply companies were reselling them for (which is half of what they retail for new). I figured that savings margin alone was enough that I could buy the pod and if I couldn’t figure out a plan for it, resell it myself and break even.

I already knew that I could work in the pod for a few hours at a time, since I had been doing that at a regular cadence while I was working in the office. But I wasn’t sure if I could work from it all day. To test this, I decided to go into the city and work from a pod for the whole day.

That experiment went well, or well enough for me to consider giving the experiment a try. I was also able to use the opportunity to take a number of measurements, which were going to be important if I was going to figure out where it would go at home.

The last major thing to figure out was how I was going to move it. I emailed the local sales rep for Framery, the manufacturer, and they directed me to a professional furniture installation company that did their installs. They had installed a bunch of these before and were confident they could get it out and reinstalled at my home. That would set me back another couple of grand, but not so much that I wasn’t willing to roll the dice.

I also took some time to look into alternative solutions. I looked into custom built sheds and DIY kits, and those would all be similarly priced but without all of the nice glass, making the interior potentially quite dark and unpleasant to work from. A DIY kit also likely would not be insulated from sound in the same way. Aesthetically, the pod is quite nice looking; certainly nicer looking than a cheaper DIY kit would be.

The final question was where would I put it. Ultimately I would want it in the backyard, but there was no place readily available for it. Our two car garage does not have any cars. Cars live on the street. Inside the garage, half of it is dedicated to our home gym, and the other half has the trash bins and my workbench. I decided that, in the absence of a ready location in the backyard, I could house it in the garage for a while as I figured out exactly what to do with it.

At this point, I felt pretty confident that, at the very least it wouldn’t be a very expensive experiment if I could sell the pod if it failed. I pulled the trigger and had it delivered to our condo and assembled in the garage.

The clock starts

For almost a full year I didn’t do anything else with the pod. I would occasionally work from it for a change of scenery, but other than that I didn’t do much concrete with it until my wife got pregnant. Once that happened the clock on how long I could procrastinate started ticking. It was time to revisit my plans to build some sort of office space around it in earnest. The first problem I had to figure out what where I was going to put it.

There were a number of considerations including:

• Exposure to light – light means heat and glare, both of which can make a workspace uncomfortable
• The view from the pod – I was going to be working from this space for up to 8 hours a day, so I wanted a decent view
• Privacy – Not essential to the work itself, but I also didn’t necessarily want to be in full view of the neighbors while working in my pajamas
• Proximity to the neighbors – and while I wanted to be away from the neighbors for privacy, I also didn’t want my neighbors to have to look at my office all day either
• How it would look from the house – ideally this would not be an eyesore on our otherwise pleasant looking backyard

The good news is that I had already made a number of these considerations before. The bad news is that I had done this when figuring out where to put the hot tub, which meant that the hot tub was currently in the spot with the most privacy, shade, and out of view from the house. So I had identified generally where the pod should go, but it was currently occupied by a hot tub sitting on a gravel pad. This meant I had to figure out a new place for the hot tub, dig a new gravel pad, and move it.

The only other place that the hot tub could feasibly go was where my garden used to be. We had a rectangular patch of mulch that I had a number of container bags on for tomatoes, peppers, and herbs. I would have to get rid of the garden, but at least I would still have a hot tub. And with a new kid on the way I probably wouldn’t have much time for gardening anyway.

The pod would need to sit on something stable so I would have to get a concrete pad poured. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos to get a sense of what pouring a concrete pad entailed, and quickly decided that would be one of the jobs to outsource.

Once the pod was outside and on a firm piece of ground, I would still need something to cover it and keep the elements off of it. I eventually stumbled across an aluminum pergola kit that was good looking and could be easily assembled with a few people. The pod was mostly glass and a durable looking sheet metal exterior, so I was pretty confident that if I caulked the seams and treated the exposed bits of plywood that it would be sufficiently weather resistant.

The pod could get power from a nearby outlet that the hot tub had previously been plugged into, but I would have to get a new outlet and circuit installed to power the hot tub in it’s new location.

It was going to take a lot of work, but a rough plan was starting to take shape. The major pieces of work would be:

1. Removing the garden and tearing up any of the existing drip irrigation that would be covered either by the new concrete pad or the new gravel pad.
2. Getting a new circuit and outlet installed (and pulling a permit).
3. Digging a new gravel pad.
4. Moving the hot tub (how was TBD).
5. Getting a concrete pad poured.
6. Disassembling and reassembling the pod from the garage to the new concrete pad.
7. Installing the pergola over the pod.
8. Weatherproofing the pod.
9. Remodeling the pod interior for a single desk configuration.

Now that the large parts of the work had roughly taken shape, I started to put together a Gantt chart of how the work would take place.

The electrical work would need to get started first to ensure that the permit could get pulled, since I wouldn’t be able to move the hot tub without that. After that, I would need to work on moving the hot tub so that the concrete pad could get poured, which would unblock the rest of the work with the pod itself.

I put together a plan that would start in December and run through January.

A surprise delay

Unfortunately, a few days after Thanksgiving I noticed a sharp pain in my side. It felt like an awful stomach cramp and made me turn back early from a walk with the dog. I thought it was food poisoning but a few days later I still had slight pains. I called one of my doctor friends and he said it was probably appendicitis and that I should go to the ER. I begrudgingly went and got an MRI which confirmed the diagnosis and had an appendectomy the same day.

I was told that I wouldn’t be able to lift anything more than 10 pounds for at least 30 days, which would put most of the upcoming work on hold. The soonest that I would be cleared to start doing mild physical exertion would be Jan. 1 of 2024, and Emily wanted everything with the pod done by the end of January so that I could start working on the nursery, which would be its own home improvement project.

In the meantime I could at least work with contractors to finalize the electrical and concrete work, and book the pod reassembly. I also placed the order of the pergola since it would be shipped from Europe.

A very busy January

By New Years Eve I was feeling antsy and got a jump start on removing the garden by emptying the grow bags. Because I was using grow bags and not planters it was actually pretty easy to get everything moved out of the way, though dragging large bags of soil was almost certainly not doctor recommended. I then worked on digging up some of the drip irrigation lines that would have to be removed. My wife chastised me several times over the course of this I didn’t really have time to wait and I was feeling sufficiently rested and recovered.

Once I had the space cleared I set about laying out the outline of a new gravel pit. I dug out an 8’x8’ square and framed it with pressure treated 2”x4”s. Once the boards seemed relatively level I bought a ton of cement gravel from Home Depot and started filling it in and tamping it down. Eventually it was filled in and I was able to drag a 12’ board across the frame top to make it more or less level.

I looked into moving the hot tub and it seemed like it would be doable with a few people. I put an ad up on Craigslist was able to find a couple of construction workers that were willing to do it. It felt a bit silly to hire three guys to move it 15 feet but there was no way I could move it by myself. They showed up and were able to use a few lifting harnesses to safely move it on to the new gravel pad. With the hot tub out of the way, work could finally begin on the new pod location.

With the hot tub out of the way, the next step was getting the concrete pad poured. I had designed the pad to be the same dimensions as the pergola, and I had them radius the pad around the existing flagstone. I figured that one of the pergola legs could extend onto the flagstone without impacting the sitting area too much.

It took a couple days for the crew to dig the forms and then pour the cement, which was made trickier by the rain but they were able to get it done hanging tarps over it.

After the concrete pad had cured enough to walk on, I set about getting the pergola setup. I posted another Craigslist ad for help and was able to hire a couple of guys for an afternoon to help me set it up. It was lightly raining but we were still able to get it set up with a few hours. The height of the pod was going to be just under the height of the pergola, so I bought a bunch of cement tiles that I could use to raise the pergola higher. The nice thing about the tiles over a true cement pier is that they were easy to manipulate by myself; I could left a leg by myself and slide an individual tile into place. And if I decided I wanted it to be higher or lower I could just add another tile.

At this point the pod could finally move out from the garage and into it’s intended resting place in the backyard. I hired the same professional installation company to move it from the garage to the backyard, but I had a few days before that would happen. I used that time to modify my standing desk to fit in the pod. I had a 6ft standing desk originally but the mounting hardware could be shortened to a smaller desk, so I bought another table top from IKEA that fit perfectly and re-mounted the hardware to that.

I was also going to need a new monitor stand that could double as a laptop stand and keyboard tray. In my old desk configuration I had enough space to keep my laptop next to my monitor, but my new desk would be a little too short to do that, which meant I had to downgrade to a single monitor configuration. IKEA sells an unfinished monitor stand which would be perfect, as it has a shelf for a closed laptop, and space beneath to push the keyboard out of the way if necessary. With some light sanding and a few coats of spray paint I was able to match that to the desk.

By the time I was done with those projects it was the day of the big move. The crew was able to get it disassembled and re-assembled on the pad over the course of a morning. While they were disassembling it I took measurements of the plywood frame to figure out where I could put in screws to install a pegboard on the back wall. This was a huge milestone and it meant that I no longer had to do any more coordinating with contractors! There was still additional work to be done but it was now mostly smaller stuff that I could do by myself. I would have to do more to make it weatherproof in the coming days, but in the meantime I used masking tape to cover all of the vents and seams.

The last major step to having the pod safely outside was trying to weatherize it, in particular to keep it dry in the face of rain. The condo itself would block a lot of sun, wind, and rain, but rain could certainly still get to it from the sides. The pod consists of a plywood frame with a sheet metal exterior that is actually attached to the frame by magnets. I removed the metal frame and then used teak oil to treat the plywood frame. Teak oil is easy to apply and because it is thinner than other finishes, and would get sucked into places that unwanted water would likely go. I then applied silicon caulk to all of the seams as another layer of protection.

There were some big winter storms coming through soon and the pergola wasn’t anchored to the ground, and was not rated to have the louvres closed during high winds, but I would need them closed to keep rain off the pod so I used corkscrew ground anchors and ratcheting tie down straps to simulate the force of anchoring.

It was a very busy month, but I got the pergola ratcheted down on January 31, so it all came together on schedule. The pod was now (hopefully) robust and, at the most basic level, technically fit for working. I had electricity, a desk, and a quiet place to take phone calls. The rest of the work would be making it a more comfortable place to work from.

Finishing touches

Over the next couple months I continued to make minor adjustments to my set up. I still had a desk in our second bedroom, but as I continued to transform it into a nursery, it became less and less suitable to work from, and more of my time would shift to the pod.

One of the first things I did was set up the pegboard to hold some of my office supplies. I intentionally wanted to keep the space minimalist. At the end of the day, there’s not all that much that I really need to be productive. I need an ergonomic position to work from, but beyond that I really just need my computer, and a few basic things like a mouse and a keyboard.

I specifically did not want to put up pictures or other sources of distraction. Even things like physical books I rarely reference in practice, particularly because with technical books it’s generally faster now to search or ask AI and you can’t copy and paste from a physical book. Having a sit/stand desk also meant that I couldn’t really put any shelves on the desk side of the wall because anything up high would bump into the monitor if I wanted to stand.

With that being said, there wasn’t that much that I needed to fit on the pegboard. On my original desk I kept an inbox and outbox that I would process once a week which was useful for managing bills and stuff like that. I also needed headphones (a couple different versions, in ear and over a ear) as well as some various cables for connecting phones and devices. IKEA sells a bunch of different components and I was able to configure my pegboard with two folders, one for an inbox and an outbox, some clips for cords and headphones, and a few cups for stationary.

Using a pegboard system allows me to keep it modular and adjust it if needed, though I haven’t really changed it from the original set up at all.

I also purchased a holder for dry erase markers that allows me to write on the walls. This is handy for short-lived to-do lists or leaving off notes of what to pick up the next day.

I needed a small trashcan to be able to put things like tissues. My floor space is pretty limited and I didn’t want something getting kicked around by my feet, so I bought a small IKEA waste bin and drilled a few holes in the back so I could mount it with suction cup hooks to the glass, so it floats at about knee height. This keeps it in a handy position but out of the way of my feet.

Pretty early on I realized that glare was going to be an issue in the morning. Later in the day the condo blocks the sun, but as it is rising in the morning it comes straight in which makes it very difficult to see the computer screen.

The company that makes the pergola sells a blind attachment, but it is about $1000, which seemed awfully expensive. I ordered a large tension rod and blackout curtains from IKEA, along with some fasteners to hold them open. This solution cost well under $200 and has been working very well so far for the price. If it’s windy then they will flap a bit, but the wind usually doesn’t pick up until the afternoon at which point I can tie them back.

I think the curtains soften the appearance, and I added a fun doormat that completes the look.

As the weather started to get nicer I found myself wanting to be able to prop the door open, but there wasn’t a good way to do that without it being blown about by the breeze. I bought a large cane bolt like you would use to keep a side gate open and installed it on the door of the pod. I had to use my Dremel tool with a cut off wheel to remove some of the metal so that it didn’t impact the rubber gasket that runs inside the door to help with sound insulation. Also, because the door swings open over the concrete pad there was not a good surface for the cane bolt to drop into. To work around this I bought a brick and drilled a giant hole in it so that I could lower the cane bolt into that to prop the door open.

In order to keep the pod warm during the winter I found a small space heater that doesn’t take up much space and is more than capable of heating up the pod. It can raise the temperature of the pod quite quickly, as much as 10° in a matter of 20 minutes. The pod has lights and ventilation fans that are motion activated. In order to disable this I put a sliding webcam cover over the motion sensor so that I can disable it if I don’t want the ventilation fans to suck out all of the warm air.

Reflections on the pod

Hindsight 20/20, there’s very little about the process that I would have changed. The only thing that I would do differently is have a slightly bigger concrete pad poured. I had the pad poured to the exact dimensions of the pergola, but the problem with that is if I were to anchor the pergola directly to the pad, three of the four anchoring bolts would be right on the very edge of the concrete pad and liable to break off. I would’ve probably been better off if I added a foot to each dimension so that the outermost edge of the pergola feet were 6 inches inside the concrete pad border.

I also had a small sofa and stool initially that I eventually replaced with my old desk chair. The sofa was nice to have for breaks, but the stool wasn’t particularly comfortable to sit at for extended periods of time.

It’s been well over a year since I transitioned my office to the pod and for the most part it has worked really well. I generally don’t spend eight hours a day five days a week working in it, but certainly most afternoons are spent working from the pod.

On days where my wife works in the office I will typically work at her desk to mix things up, and on Fridays I will often go work from a coffee shop or a bar for several hours.

On the financial side, there’s no doubt that it was a good decision. The cost of real estate around here is astronomical, and moving to get another bedroom in the same neighborhood would’ve been prohibitively expensive, especially with the recent rise in interest rates.

When compared with something like a WeWork membership, it still pays for itself within 5 to 7 years. And that’s not factoring in commuting costs or the value of my time.

The value of a home office is huge, especially with a small child at home. I was able to go back to work at just five weeks after my daughter was born but still be a helpful parent at home because I could run in at a moments notice and change a blowout diaper or watch the monitor while my wife took a quick shower. Having a dedicated workspace that is separate from the rest of the house has been invaluable for being able to focus on work while still being present for my family.