Setting up a home office: furniture, lighting and sockets

Where to put the desk before anything gets assembled

Decide the desk's position before you open a single flat-pack box. Moving an assembled desk and a full set of shelving afterwards is awkward and sometimes means partial disassembly, so it's worth standing in the room for a few minutes first.

Natural light from the side is more useful than light from behind or in front. A window behind you throws glare onto the screen; a window facing you means squinting at a bright rectangle all day. Side light, with the option to close a blind for video calls, works best in practice.

In panel-block flats the room often has one obvious wall for a desk and not much else — check where the radiator, the door swing and any built-in wardrobe leave usable space before you commit. In an older Kalamaja or Nõmme wooden house, check the wall for damp or draught first, since exterior walls in these buildings are not always as well insulated as the rest of the room.

Assembling the desk and shelving — what's easy and what goes wrong

A basic flat-pack desk is genuinely a job most people can do themselves with the supplied hex key and a bit of patience — an hour or two, mainly spent checking you haven't put a panel on backwards. Where it goes wrong is with heavier standing desks, corner units, and anything that needs to be fixed to the wall.

Shelving is the part people underestimate. Wall-mounted shelving needs to be fixed into a stud or a proper wall anchor, not just into plasterboard or a soft render, or it will eventually come down with whatever is on it. In a Soviet-era panel building the wall is usually concrete, which needs a hammer drill and the right plug, not the fixing screws that came in the box.

Where assembly is worth paying for: heavy or awkward pieces, anything going onto a wall you're not sure about, and flat-pack furniture where the instructions have clearly been translated twice. Furniture assembly is charged from 39 € per hour, and for a desk plus a couple of shelving units that's usually a short, predictable job rather than an open-ended one.

Where sockets in a home office actually need to be

Most home office corners were never planned as such — the room has one or two sockets meant for a lamp and a vacuum cleaner, not a laptop, monitor, dock, lamp and phone charger all at once. An extension lead across the floor works for a while, but it's a trip hazard and not something to leave behind a desk permanently.

The practical fix is a socket group at desk height, ideally in the skirting or wall behind where the desk will sit, rather than down at floor level where you have to reach behind furniture every time. If you're also running a second monitor or a printer, plan for more sockets than you think you need — four is a more realistic number than two.

This is also the point to think about a network point if you want a wired connection rather than relying on Wi-Fi through a concrete panel wall, which is where Wi-Fi tends to struggle most in older Tallinn flats.

• One socket group at desk height for the computer setup, not down near the skirting
• A separate socket for a desk lamp so it isn't sharing a socket with the dock
• Extra capacity for a printer, second monitor or docking station
• A wired network point nearby if Wi-Fi through concrete walls has been unreliable
• Sockets positioned so no cable has to cross the floor where you walk

Can you run the cable and fit a socket yourself

Fitting a visible socket into an existing back box, or swapping an old one for a new one on the same circuit, is within reach for someone reasonably confident with tools, provided the power is off and you're clear on which wire is which. Running new cable behind plasterboard or through a concrete wall to add a socket where there wasn't one is a different job.

New wiring, extending a circuit, or adding a socket where there's currently none should be done by a qualified electrician, both because a mistake here is a fire risk and because it needs to be done to a standard that holds up if you ever sell or rent the flat. Electrical work is charged from 49 € per hour, and installing a socket where the wiring already reaches is often priced as a fixed job from 35 €.

If the building is on an older fuse board or you're not sure how much spare capacity the circuit has, that's also a question for an electrician rather than a guess — adding several new high-draw sockets to an already stretched circuit is exactly the kind of thing that trips a breaker at the worst moment.

What lighting actually helps when you're looking at a screen

A single ceiling light is rarely enough on its own and is often the wrong kind of light for screen work — it can create a dim glow across the whole room while leaving the desk itself in its own shadow, particularly if you sit facing away from it.

A desk lamp with an adjustable arm, positioned to the side rather than directly in front of the screen, is the single most useful addition. Look for adjustable brightness and a warmer colour temperature for evening work, since a very cold white light next to a bright screen is tiring over a full day.

Avoid placing any light source so it reflects directly in the screen, and avoid lighting that's much brighter than the screen itself, since your eyes will keep adjusting between the two. A small amount of ambient light in the rest of the room, even just a lamp in a corner, reduces the contrast between the screen and its surroundings and is more comfortable over a working day than a bright spotlight and a dark room.