Organization Overhaul (i.e. How I Optimized My Home Office Setup)
/I've spent the last 3 days totally revamping all of the storage in my studio room! Things had been getting seriously cluttered and it was really bothering me.
A few years ago I turned the room's closet into a permanent gear storage spot, and as much as I like it, I think I've outgrown it.
I absolutely love the way cameras and lenses looks when they're lined up neatly on white shelves.
But the rest of the closet became a cluttered mess:
I use all of this stuff, so it's not junk– it's just stored in a junky fashion.
Plus we live in California and had a small earthquake last week. Not unusual, but really made me think about the possibility that all of this expensive stuff could come crashing down. So I decided to clean it all out and get some strong metal tool chests to keep everything organized and safe!
I have a "main" chest that has a nice work surface and also stores my main equipment. Plus it's blue.
It's a Husky tool chest that I found at Home Depot, and it came with a top part that was too big to fit on it in the closet, so I made a little platform thing out of some spare wood and put it on the other side of the closet to organize cables and other small bits of gear that are always floating around. I made the platform tall enough to fit camera bags and stuff underneath.
I was super psyched about this until I looked next to my work desk and saw this mess (the cameras on top are cool, but the shelves underneath are a dusty nightmare):
Aside from the dog bone, this is all a disaster. Home Depot didn't have anything that would fit under the desk, so I went to Lowe's and found two small tool chests that were the perfect size. The only problem was that they stored them in the upper atmosphere, so I had to bug someone to use a forklift to get them. Luckily they were nice about it. Thanks Lowe's!
I still need to "optimize" how everything is organized, but it's infinitely better than before. Even though I've been making videos in this room for almost 5 years now, this was removing the last remnants of "oh yeah it's just an extra bedroom" and making it 100% a place to do audio/video stuff.
There's still some stuff on the shelves in the closet, but it's nothing that I'm super worried about falling down, and it's all stuff that's really handy to have in quick reach.
The bad news is that I started this project literally hours after I finished editing an updated "Studio Tour" video. So that's already out of date even though it's not published yet. 😬
But I figure I can make a follow up video specifically about equipment organization and stuff.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that it's 100% worth the effort to organize your space in a way that suits you and helps relieve stress you might not even realize you had.