Working from Home While Your Life Gets Packed Away #spoiledProgrammerProblems

Three monitor setup until I moved a computer desk over.
Arrangement before more appropriate furniture

The problem with moving a home office, especially over a long distance, is that at some point, an uncomfortable portion of your office will need to be packed away. While I don’t have to have a lot to do my job beyond my company-supplied 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, I had purchased a Seiki 4K display and was using it as my main code editing screen. Once even the moving boxes we packed up, how was I supposed to work? At some point, I’d need to be able to work without carrying around 3 screens (I’ll admit that I plugged in the third screen just because it was there.)

Fortunately, a coworker had recently pointed me toward Display Menu, which brings back a screen resolution menu for the recent versions of OS X. With that, I was able to crank up the screen resolution to the native Retina resolution of 2880×1800. While I initially did this in the interest of just trying to see how much screen real estate I could squeeze in, it had the added bonus of being able to display almost as much information as the 4K display (ok, about 66% as much, but the 4K display is a monster.)

So, in anticipation of not having my three monitor setup, I’ve been adjusting to working from the Retina display alone. With the higher resolution, that’s very manageable, and it has the added bonus of being able to work in a coffee shop or out on a deck without being an ass or hauling a car load of equipment out. I also have been working from the island in the kitchen, which won’t be packed up for the move. The smaller arrangement takes a little bit of mental adjustment, but it works perfectly fine for programming.

There are still a couple of accessories for the MacBook Pro that I keep in use with the reduced setup: a Magic Trackpad and a Matias Laptop Pro keyboard. Somehow, these accessories make the workspace feel more like a desktop. It’s probably because moving workspaces involves an armful of equipment and more than one trip, just like a full desktop spread would.

Finding Rental Property that Accepts Dogs

We’ve been looking at Zillow, Trulia rentals, Realtor.com, and Apartments.com apps for the last couple of months. It seems like the info on many of the meta real estate sites is likely to be out of date.

Big Horse Seymour

Our biggest problem:

Seymour is about 75 pounds. He’s not a “dangerous” dog by any reasonable definition,  but he’s definitely *not* a small dog. Most of the rentals we’ve looked at the “accept” dogs have a limit of 20 lbs. I’m pretty sure I’ve never had an adult dog that was under that limit.

One slightly more fruitful way to independent searching for houses for rent was to take note of the property management company renting a house that came close and then checking their site. Still, we had maybe one house that didn’t explicitly rule us out.

Frustrated, I finally got desperate and found the Facebook page of a local dog rescue and asked for suggestions. Dog rescue people are amazing resources for helping you figure out how to find places that will allow your fur beasts.

Facebook Response to my post
Facebook Response to my post

As you can see, I even found someone with a house for rent in the area. I reached out to the realtor in the responses and not only found out about several places available that would take our boys on, but several in the school district that we were targeting, and 2 well under our budget.

Maybe I jumped the gun a bit on looking, but it was pretty frustrating trying to locate a place, and I was losing confidence that we’d find a place within a reasonable amount of time.

I’ll post an update once we get down there on perception vs. reality, but finding a place for our pets is looking way more promising than it did a few weeks ago.

It begins

I had easily shrugged off the chaos that moving was going to bring. After all, we were only going to list our house. It might not even sell. We’d just have to put up with periodic showings and figuring out what to do with the dogs during that time. There was no real risk of this actually happening.

And then we got an offer on the house and everything started falling into place. And we figured out how much this move was going to cost. There wasn’t going to be some house sell windfall fairy that was going to pay for all of this. It was going to be tight.

And then, all of sudden, we started packing up boxes of things that we had used in recent memory. Not daily stuff, but still enough that occasionally there was the, “Oh, right… that’s packed away.”

We’ve called three portable storage companies for moving costs. I even checked on full service moving (too expensive, but maybe 15% more than movers + storage and transport.)

And I have a large treadmill. And two occasionally rowdy medium-large dogs.

Oh yeah, and we’re going to the Philippines in between selling the house and moving in to the new house.

WHAT WERE WE THINKING?