Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of The Testing Psychologist Podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. Loving this groove of podcasting, and getting back to weekly episodes after taking a break. I hope everybody’s summer is going well.
I guess at this point we are into September or we will be when this is released. For me, that’s super exciting because that means college football. I’ve talked about growing up in South Carolina. I went to the University of South Carolina for undergrad and that is a huge [00:01:00] football school. It’s in what a lot of people would call the biggest football conference, the SEC.
This is a super exciting time of year for me. There’s just something about that combination of sensory input; the weather changing, the leaves changing, being outside, and football that brings back so many memories. So, super exciting. I hope y’all are starting to get into some fall traditions as well. We’re heading toward fall. I know a lot of people love fall and there’s some nice rituals that happen around that time. So hope you are all doing well.
Today, I am talking all about furniture and office arrangements for testing practices.
When I was thinking about doing this episode, I thought to myself, is this even relevant, is this [00:02:00] boring, or do people need this? I eventually, obviously settled on, yes, this is relevant. I looked back in the Facebook group and there’ve been a lot of questions about how to set up an office, how to store testing materials, what furniture is appropriate, and what kind of office setup and layout makes sense. So I thought let’s just go for it. We’ll see how this turns out. Hopefully, you can take away some important info. I’m going to speak primarily to how I’ve done it which has, honestly been pulled from what I’ve seen from other practices over the years. So, here we go.
I think one of the main things, we can start big picture and what you might think about, I’m going to approach it from two different ways. One is if you are in the [00:03:00] situation where you might be moving offices or you have the choice to get a new office or find a new office, I’m going to talk about it that way where you can plan from the beginning, and then we’ll tackle it from what do you do if you are in your existing space, plan to be there, and need to change or tweak some things.
If you are in the market looking for an office and you know you’re going to be doing testing, I think that affords you a lot of… Well, that’s a luxury where you can do some planning. I would say, the essential features of a testing office are:
1. Having a separate waiting area of some sort. Whatever you have to do to make that happen, especially if you’re testing kids, it is so nice to have a little space where parents can hang out. We offer [00:04:00] free wifi. We set up a separate wifi network for parents or for clients to use here that’s separate from our internal network. So that’s pretty easy. You can attach a separate router and configure it to provide a different network from your main router. So we offer separate wifi for clients but we have a little sitting space. We have a bistro table where people can sit and spread out their work materials or whatever it might be so that parents who are hanging out for a while can do that and get some work done. So I think it’s pretty crucial to have a waiting area of some sort that’s separate from the testing space.
There was some discussion the other day on the Facebook group about how one particular person has an office where the main door walks right into [00:05:00] the testing office and that is posing all sorts of challenges. And so, if you can avoid that, I think that’s super important. So that’s step one.
Step two is finding some amount of storage space. I think this depends. We are fortunate enough right now. We have an office with a small storage closet. That goes a long way, obviously for storing testing materials. But if you are looking for a new office, I think there are two ways to approach that. You can look at a space that has a very small storage closet or you can just look for an exceptionally large office that will allow you to put furniture in there to store the testing materials. So that can vary. It does not have to be a huge [00:06:00] or anything like that.
At this point, let’s see, I’m thinking about between all of our protocols, test booklets, response booklets, behavioral questionnaires, checklists, that sort of thing, it occupies, and this is not actual testing administration manuals or test materials, this is just the booklets; so the paper stuff that, for us, occupies at this point, three entire file drawers in a regular-sized filing cabinet. Well, in one of our offices, we have a nice lateral file cabinet. So the drawers go horizontally and that’s pretty helpful. You can get a lot of testing materials in there and that’s just something to keep in [00:07:00] mind if you’re planning for the furniture that you’re going to use. So, three file drawers are at least what you’d need for the booklets.
In terms of the actual testing materials, then we’re talking about, what we do is put each one in a separate container. I just bought small, let’s say, 10 by 12 portable file boxes from Target and I have 8 or 10 of those where we have test kits stored in those file boxes. Now, we exchange testing materials between several different clinicians. So that helps where we keep it all stored in the central, that closet, and people can take the materials that they need and grab the test kit in the boxes and take them to the office.
I’ve seen different [00:08:00] variations on this. Some practices will have storage containers like those rolling Tupperware containers with rolling drawers. They put a test kit in each little drawer, and then the person comes in, grabs the materials, and takes the drawer to the office that they’re going to work in. That’s more of a function for multi-clinician practices where you’re going to be trading test materials back and forth. But I think ease of access is pretty important.
Now, I should say too, I mean all of this is largely rendered a moot point if you are using Q-interactive where a lot of the testing materials are contained in the iPad. You’ll still have the Wexler blocks and a few different manipulatives, but those are pretty easily transported.
[00:09:00] Anyway, getting back to storage furniture, if you don’t have a small storage closet, you are looking for an office that’s big enough where you will have room to store all of that testing stuff. So like I said, you can get a regular file cabinet. You can disguise that by one, either buying a horizontal filing cabinet that looks like a chest of drawers, but a little shorter. You can certainly decorate your filing cabinet. I’m sure on Pinterest or Facebook or something, there are all sorts of ideas to do that that will go way beyond anything I could think of.So you can disguise or hide the filing cabinet or you could just buy a nice-looking vertical file cabinet if you would like. But like I said, about three drawers for that, and then for all the test administration kits, that would require at least another two drawers, depending on [00:10:00] how many kids you’re working with. Sometimes you get into awkward test materials like with the D-KEFs tower or little things like that, that just have awkward shapes. So keep that in mind.
Now, one thing that I think is important is if you’re doing an autism spectrum assessment and you have that ADOS kit, I, to be honest, have not found a great way to store all of those toys. I just keep it in that original Tupperware that it came in, which is huge and awkward. If you have a big enough office, you can store it in there. I would put a tablecloth or a drape or something like that over it to disguise it. And you can use it as a small table during the times when you’re not administering.
At times, I have even used the ADOS Tupperware as the table during the ADOS administration. [00:11:00] You shut it, you disguise it, and you can manipulate toys and things on top of that as the table. So that’s another, at least for me, a big selling point for having an actual storage closet. It doesn’t have to be big, but just room to put that ADOS Tupperware.
In terms of places to get cheap furniture, this question comes up a lot, I’m going to assume that everybody knows about Goodwill, secondhand stores, and things like that. So that’s definitely out there.
I’ll often get the question how much does it cost to furnish an office or a testing office? I found that generally speaking, and this is buying all new stuff that I think is decent quality, it’s not amazing, but it’s lasted so far for years, I can get away with $800 to $1000 to [00:12:00] furnish an office pretty nicely. That’s pretty much everything in the office aside from personal decorations. So little knickknacks and chalk keys and things like that and pictures and whatnot.
Places that I tend to go to look for furniture are Amazon, Wayfair- I get a lot of stuff from Wayfair and they have sister sites, AllModern, I’ll look on sometimes. I get a fair number of things from Target. There are these particular lamps that I really liked that we got from Target. So those are my primary sources for office furniture. I like Wayfair because they do have a business account and you can get business pricing from them at times on certain items, and they’re on the internet. It’s easy to access. They have a ton of [00:13:00] reviews. Most of the time those are pretty accurate and you can really tell what people are liking.
The other option, of course, is Ikea. We have an Ikea nearby. I’m sure people have any number of feelings about Ikea. Mine are generally negative, but the furniture though has been good. It’s been good. And they have a lot of options for hacking their furniture, so to speak. There are two websites out there that I will list in the show notes that talk about Ikea hacks. What that means is, you can buy separate pieces of Ikea furniture and hack them together or attach them or modify them somehow, usually pretty easily to create furniture that works.
What I’ve seen a lot of people do with with Ikea furniture is they [00:14:00] have two versions of a folding table, hinged maybe is the right word where the table is attached to the wall and it’s on a hinge so it can drop down and lay flat if you want it to, vertically against the wall, or you can prop it up and make a table out of it. And that’s super helpful, obviously for doing testing.
So Ikea is out there. Like I said, I’ll put a link in the show notes to to the Ikea hacks website, but I’ve seen people build testing tables out of that. They also have a nice cube system. I have three of their cube shelves. I think the ones that I have are the Klax or Kallax. Those are great for storing testing materials as well. If you happen to have just a single clinician practice or you have a testing office where everyone rotates through, I think [00:15:00] those are great to use to store the testing kits. And you could probably even figure out a way to store the booklets in there as well in a cube system. So that can be super helpful.
Now, one thing that people consider a lot is, how do I set up a testing space and a “therapy space” in the office? I’ve done this pretty easily, I think in even relatively small spaces. For me, the central piece here is an L desk. My taste and those of my clinicians lean toward a little bit more modern. So, we have an L desk. It is not huge. It doesn’t have a big hutch or anything like that on it. I will provide a link in the show notes to the one that we typically use, but I [00:16:00] got it from Amazon. It has a nice wood veneer top. And then the base is metal.
I’ve bought a few of these for the different offices where we do testing. I like it because it comes in black, but you can easily spray paint the bottom to match whatever the office decor might be. We spray-painted one white, we’ve kept one black, but you can match it to whatever color you’d like. It serves really well. The long side is great to have a computer, some files, a good workspace, and then the L side- the shorter side is perfect for administering tests. There’s plenty of room for the testing materials and seems to work quite well. Again, it doesn’t take up much space, but it definitely gets the job done. So we have [00:17:00] several of those in the offices that we have.
And then beyond that, it really depends. A lot of the time when you’re doing testing, you can assume that you will have at least two people in the room aside from yourself for an interview or a feedback session. Families typically are involved in testing whatever the circumstance might be. Now, sometimes there are no families involved, and in that case, you’re fine. You have a chair for the testee and that’s about it.
I’m a big fan of Loveseats. This is a necessary evil, I guess that if people are present, they have to squeeze on the Loveseat. That’s just how it goes. And then I have a chair for myself and then we’ll typically put in [00:18:00] another chair as well, just in case. That’s my formula, I suppose, for testing offices, two small but reasonable and comfortable chairs and then a medium-sized loveseat. That has done very well for us over the years. There’ve been very rare cases when I’ve had to pull in an extra chair, like a rolling chair or something from another office, but you can get away pretty easily. A lot of loveseats, I think you can find on someplace like Wayfair, you can find between $300 and $400, chairs typically run between $100 and $200, and that gives you a pretty nice setup for a testing space when you couple that with your L-desk.
I have, I think, jumped around a little bit here. I started off talking [00:19:00] about how to plan your actual space if you are searching for an office. Just to touch base on that again, if you can have a separate waiting area, that’s fantastic. If you can, set up separate wifi. I think that helps to let people stick around and be comfortable if they’re waiting for their family member to get tested. A small storage closet is ideal. If not, a larger office is something that would be helpful as well. That larger office affords you room for storage. It also affords you room to put in plenty of furniture that can facilitate the testing and the feedback sessions.
Revisiting that, I definitely get chairs that are easily moved; ones that I can drag pretty easily and there are a ton of choices out there. So if you have to move the chairs around or make room for the testing like the [00:20:00] L-desk to make room for a chair for the client to sit in, that’s totally reasonable.
Aside from that, I think it is important to consider a couple of other things. One of those is what you might do in the event that you have an office that you’re not going to be moving from. It’s not ideal. What can you do to tweak that office to make sure that it is testing-friendly?
One major solution that I had to figure out very early on, just as a side story, I started out in a very small office. It was not set up for testing at all. The only pieces of furniture in this office were my chair, which is a rolling chair, a large couch, and a very small side table where I put my computer [00:21:00] and a cup of water or whatever.
Now, I was lucky in that the office had at least a tiny closet. It’s one of those closets, it’s like a foot deep. It just had two shelves in it. So closet is maybe even a glorified term, but I was lucky that had a little bit of storage where I could put some of the testing materials, but furniture-wise, I didn’t have much to work with. So I was doing a lot of report writing on my lap. What I ended up doing is very bare bones, but it got the job done. Nobody ever complained about the setup, but I went to Walmart, I bought a very inexpensive folding table that’s probably about 2ft by 3ft and I could store it behind the couch. It was that thin when it folded up and I used my [00:22:00] rolling chair for my chair and I used a folding metal chair for the client chair. So not great, but it was doable. So, at the very least, you can get a small folding table that would get the job done for you.
People also often ask about rolling briefcases. This is something that I used way back in the early days, certainly. You can get a good rolling briefcase for under $100 on Amazon. A rolling briefcase, if you pack it correctly, you can fit many test kits in there. I mean, at least 3 or 4 test kits, the Wechsler scales, WIAT, there’s even room for D-KEFs tower or Grooved Pegboard, something like that. So, if you’re a pretty good spatial organizer, you can [00:23:00] pack one of those rolling briefcases pretty full and get the materials back and forth pretty easily.
Something like that certainly could store in a corner of your office. It could store in your car. It could store in a closet. So, a good rolling briefcase is potentially helpful for you if you’re running super low on space to store testing materials. It’s not going to be the neatest, but it certainly gets the job done. In fact, when I worked for a Neuropsychologist in grad school, that was all that we used. We traded that rolling briefcase back and forth between 3 or 4 grad students every week. So that thing was pretty beat up after two years, but it got the job done. It held an entire battery for a legitimate clinical neuropsychologist. So certainly doable.
So those are some thoughts just about [00:24:00] furniture, what to do if you are planning your office or moving to a new office. Basic info, but hopefully helpful and important. Also what to do if you are trying to start up some testing and don’t have the space to do it right now. So do not overlook the importance or the function of a simple folding table can go a long way and that’s all that you need.
Now, we can get on to all sorts of other office layout questions. If you have kiddo clients or people are going to be waiting, then I think it’s a great idea to have a kid’s corner with toys and games and coloring books and crayons and markers and all that kind of stuff where kids can hang out or siblings can hang out and spend some time if they’re waiting on someone to be tested. I think that’s a great idea.
We have a spare iPad in the office that kiddos can play games on or [00:25:00] adults for that matter. We have a water cooler, we have a coffee machine, there’s all that kind of stuff to consider. I feel like that’s more just general office layout kind of stuff. But for testing specifically, we do have some nuances that we have to consider. I’ll just say again, the L desk is going to be your best friend, and finding great places for quality, but fairly inexpensive furniture, I think are important as well. I’ll have all of those links in the show notes, like I mentioned.
I would love to have more discussion around this. There was a great thread in the Facebook group about office layout and folks were posting pictures of their offices and how they set everything up. So if you have a cool layout to your office or other ideas about how to lay out a testing space [00:26:00] efficiently and helpfully, then feel free to send it in. The Facebook group is called The Testing Psychologist Community on Facebook. And my email address is jeremy@thetestingpsychologist.com if you want to send that to me.
Hope you are doing well in your practices. I know that there are a lot of you out there in various stages of development with your testing practices. If you are running into any roadblocks or need support in any way, I’m happy to talk with you. You can schedule a complimentary 20-minute pre-consultation call on the website, which is thetestingpsychologist.com and you will see it’s pretty easy to set up a consultation call. We can talk for a few minutes about where you’re at and where you might need support and try to figure out if consulting would be helpful for you. And if it is, I would love to work with you. [00:27:00] And if not, I will point you in the direction of things that would be helpful.
Take care. I will be back next week and we’ll keep talking testing.
All right. Thanks y’all. Bye bye.