After what feels like forever the new office is finally complete. Here's what I see when I come through the door:

As you can see I went for the Aeron chair based on the majority consensus from the advice I asked for. It's second hand off eBay (I couldn't bring myself to spend the price of a new one) and cost about half the RRP. So far I love the chair. The fact the castors move so effortlessly is worth the cost of a new chair alone.

Looking to the right and back towards the door here's what I see:

Warmth is provided by the panel heater on the wall. It's not been properly tested yet (it's "summer" here now) but it seems quite good. The plasterboard on all four walls is backed by an inch of "polystyrene". The floor has 8" of Celotex under it. The roof has 4" of sheep's wool in it. I'm hoping for a cozy winter.

The two servers in the shot above are disconnected and waiting for me to decide what to do with them. They're redundant in that they are now replaced by virtual servers on the Mac minis in the shot below. They're still trusty old dogs though and it seems a shame to get rid of them. They're merely decorative for now though.

To the left and rear of the desk is a whiteboard and bookshelves / cupboard:

You might recognise the monitor as the 22" Samsung (226BW) I bought this time last year. This is now fixed to the wall on a swing arm and acts as the window on to the two Mac minis. My main monitor is now a 24" Samsung (the 245B) which gives me a more than ample 1920x1200 resolution.

The smaller monitor will spend most of it's time in the position you see it above. When I'm debugging at the server console I can swing the monitor over so it's right next to the main monitor and I get to see exactly what's going on at the server. Perfect.

The only other aspect of the office is the view from the window:

The view looks out over the "main river" our property has a border with. Although I can't see it from the desk I can hear it trickle by with the window open. So far I've seen a surprisingly diverse set of birds perching on the branches. All in all it's a nice relaxing environment to work in. A million miles from the relative chaos of the house.

All the furniture you can see I ordered from Furnitureatwork.co.uk. It arrived in good time and was easy enough to assemble. Worth considering if you're looking for an alternative to Ikea.

The combined cost of chair and furniture is just over a grand. That brings the total for the whole project to £7k, which is about 2 more than I was hoping to spend. Still, I think it's worth it and I didn't really have another other option. There was nowhere left for me in the house!

Now that the spare room is empty of all my office stuff it's down to me to turn it in to Felix's new room. Just when I think the DIY is over there's always something else to do. All this before the new baby arrives at the end of next month. Needless to say I'll continue to be busy over the summer. Stick with me. I'll keep posting and have lots of techy stuff to get on here. Thanks for persevering.