Last Updated on November 20, 2018 by Dave Farquhar
As I’ve mentioned recently, my new job allows me to work from home one day per week. They provide me a laptop to take home, but that’s it. If I want other hardware, I have to provide it.
Fortunately for me, I was able to outfit my office on the cheap.
One of my coworkers told me to search Ebay and/or Amazon for a docking station. Sure enough, I was able to locate a surplus docking station with AC adapter for $25, a considerable discount from its $150 retail price. The make and vintage of the dock don’t seem to matter much; in my searches, I found docks for almost anything reasonably current, priced reasonably.
The keyboard wasn’t a problem; I had an IBM Model M keyboard I could use. Used Model Ms usually aren’t cheap; I’ve been picking them up over the last 15 years when I find them at a low price. I also had a Logitech optical mouse I could use. If I hadn’t had that, secondhand Microsoft optical wheel mice are cheap and durable–I have two that are around a decade old now.
Monitors were more of a problem. I have a 15-inch Sony LCD that I use for system builds, so I re-appropriated that. But the only way to get another monitor was to steal the old Dell 15-inch monitor off my web server. That worked, but left me with a headless server.
Then, this morning, I scored a 15-inch Dell monitor at a garage sale for $2. It was a little beat up, but the video cable is worth $2 to me. I asked if it worked, and the seller said it worked when she last used it. So I took a chance on it. When I got home, I noticed the screen had a small chip in it, but it works well enough for a seldom-used server display, and it was only $2.
The cheapest place I could find to get an office chair was Big Lots (Odd Lots in some parts of the country). The $40 chair I bought there isn’t the greatest, but it’s adequate, and indistinguishable from the chairs the office supply stores sell for $75 and only occasionally put on sale for less. Of course, mere days after buying the chair at Big Lots, I found a chair at a garage sale for $10. Rather than attempt to wrestle an assembled chair into a two-door Honda Civic, then back out of the Civic and down a flight of stairs at home, I opted to just keep the not-yet-assembled chair from Big Lots and save the hassle. There were just too many opportunities in that scenario for something to go horribly wrong. Had the owner possessed the correct-sized Allen wrench, partially disassembling the chair would have been an option, but I didn’t even think of that option at the time.
But with some patience, and hopefully a larger vehicle than mine, it is possible to score a second-hand office chair on Saturday mornings at garage sales or rummage sales. You won’t pay a lot for it, and there won’t be many other people looking for one, either.
As for desks, I still have a large L-shaped desk from an era when computers and monitors were far larger than they are today, and it has more surface area than the kitchen counters at my bachelor-era apartment had. It’s been sitting disassembled in my basement for years, but it went back together fairly easily. I did use Phillips-head drywall screws that were a bit longer than the Allen-head screws that came with the desk. That saved me time, and it held together better that way. Cheap self-assembled desks don’t hold up to repeated disassembly all that well, but using longer screws to get more bite seemed to help quite a bit.
If you’re not like me and don’t have a desk laying around, I know I saw some of those this morning. For that matter, I saw a couple sitting out at the curb on trash day. If you don’t want the potential hassle of having to repair and/or partially assemble a used desk without instructions, desks are cheap at Big Lots too.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He started his career as a part-time computer technician in 1994, worked his way up to system administrator by 1997, and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He invests in real estate on the side and his hobbies include O gauge trains, baseball cards, and retro computers and video games. A University of Missouri graduate, he holds CISSP and Security+ certifications. He lives in St. Louis with his family.
Another solution is to buy a cheap KVM. I think I paid around $50 for mine, which allows me to use my normal keyboard, monitor, mouse, speakers, and everything else when I telework. I was lucky enough to find a spare docking station at work for my laptop, so the KVM was my only real expense. I suppose it depends on which is more important to a guy — money, or space.