Designing a Modern Garden and Lawn Shed as a Home Office

With PV panels on the roof and a finished interior, a garden shed design can move into a totally new dimension, that of the cottage industry.  With electric riding mowers, recharged with solar generators portable power supplies, artificially lit gardens, and a portable electronic home office, a finished modern garden shed can become an small office/ home office environment.  It could even become a showroom for innovative products as well as an education "pod" or "edupod" for learning about new technologies.

Take the classical garden shed as a starting point, design the sunny side roof to hold solar panels, finish the interior, find portable heating and cooling devices as well as power supplies and generators,  an one can combine the concept of the solar green shed with an economical backyard office that can sustain its own tools, equipment, and even generate automatic revenue.  The structure itself could become a solar electric electronic depot a sort of retreat for the backyard entrepreneur.

Equipment for the Home Office

I am using a programmable calculator my first piece of equipment for my small office/ home office.  It uses a dialect of the BASIC language for programming.  It has function and menu keys that lend itself to the application of everyday math (& physics) in the home office.  Storage of programs and data is non-volatile and therefore it is a great addition to the home office library.  It can be utilized indoors and outside as well.  The design of the programmable calculator allows it to be an important component in the development of a portable home office.  Operating costs for the programmable calculator are about the cost of 1 exchange of triple A batteries per year (approximately $5) and therefore it serves as an economical component in the development of a portable-electronic home office.  I am currently involved in a study of energy and equity considerations in the design of SOHO (small office/home office  outdoor summer showrooms .  I am developing a program named CG (calculator graphics) using the drawing features of the programmable calculator.  Programmable calculators can be linked to one another to share data and programs well as to other computing equipment such as a netbook or a mini desktop computer.  There is even a video display unit for connecting the programmable calculator to a TV for educational and entertainment applications.  The programmable calculator serves as an all-in-one asset for the home office.

Open My Study for Problem Solving as an Electronic Home Office

My Study topics:

• BASICs
• Office
• e-Stuff
• Design
• Online

Problem Solving

• Programming is problem solving
• The Problem of cash flow insolvency
• The Refinance Question
• SOHO Designs
• Start-up an Online Business

Electronic Office

• Portable Electronics
• All-in-one Devices
• Edutainment
• Modernizing the "Electronic Cottage" concept
• Online & Free

Backyard Home Equity?

As part of my Energy and Equity Project (EE101), I decided to see if I could determine whether the backyard garden and entertainment areas could be valued as a form of home equity. "Outdoor Living" seems to have caught the attention of the media in recent times.  Outdoor kitchens are becoming popular.  I'm wondering what could be the effect of  building of an outdoor structure that could serve as home office could have on home equity?  Could this increase the home equity by a value equal to its cost immediately.  If the office were self sustaining or perhaps created more energy than it needed to serve its purpose of being a home office, could it be a source of ongoing revenue by virtue of its existence as well as serve as a source of accelerating home equity?  In other words, could the outdoor home office turn into a SOHO (small office/home office) for the homeowner and be an asset to the Cottage Industry?

Creating a Summer Outdoor Home Office Showroom

The first step in creating an outdoor office is to find a space that will encourage productivity.  I found the ideal space in my backyard, an outdoor garden room complete with pond, waterfall, shade tree, and patio space all surrounded with a rock garden.  Next, a portable office is a must.  We organized our home office in the library with eReaders, a Netbook computer, a portable i-projector, desk, and lighting.  This equipment is enough to transport to the backyard for a weekend of work-at-home productivity.  I plan on utilizing backyard energy in for the electricity to power the equipment.  The surrounding environment provides the backdrop for energy production as well as a great work space.

Organizing an Economical Small Office with a Home Library

Today's technology has promoted the return of the small office/home office.  The space needed for a home library can be quite small with modern electronics.  The power needed to manage a SOHO library can be minimal.

It is only a little over 30 years since microcomputer technology has revolutionized our ways of doing work.  Computing has become more and more affordable and less expensive to operate.  Multimedia introduced us to a lot of new ways to communicate ideas.  Finally, the internet has paved the way for the return of the small office/home office.  The concepts of all-in-one and portable electronics have opened up even more ways of doing personnel and home business.

Electronic technology has progressed at a rate unsurpassed by most industries.  Today we have a vast array of handheld e-Readers that take on several forms, are relatively inexpensive, and require very little energy to operate.  What is even more impressive, these Readers can store thousands of books in the space that one paperback book. More than this, the e-Readers can contain your own computing files  and thus become an important component in the configuration of an electronic office.

Some e-Readers incorporate flash memory card input.  One could configure the small office library on one of these cards to utilize the home library as a small office and or home office.  The programmable graphing calculator is another portable electronic device that can contain custom home office apps.  Since these devices are actually computing devices, they can be used with computers.  I downloaded the guidebook to my graphing calculator onto my e-Reader and I am using home office application software to document and convert my custom written apps onto a flash memory card.

The e-Reader and programmable calculator are examples of all-in-one electronic devices.  This term may have begun with the all-in-one office printer.  E-Readers can take on many forms such as e-ink based for outdoor as well as indoor use, color for presenting multimedia type content, and tablet form that contains the most flexible format.  SOHO content can be manipulated on some tablets as well as projected with all-in-one projectors.  The SOHO in a home library can truly become an economical home education and entertainment center.

BASIC Small Home Office Designs

I have started to set goals for my small home office.  Here is a list of some of them.

1)      Convert some of my home library into a BASIC small home office eLibrary

2)      Develop my home office design into  "free running" study/office/studio organized  "sun-room" ones.

3)      Use Everyday math and physics in my BASIC small home office designs.

4)      Develop a set of small home office design projects.

5)      Convert my entertainment system into a small home office "Edutainment system".