Office Makeover Before and After
Having a good home office has become more important than ever in the last two years. Our home office needs to be able to cater for two people. At the moment it’s not serving the purpose well at all. After the success of our living room makeover we were ready to tackle the office makeover.
This time we are gutting everything and replacing all the furniture. This room needs to function in many different ways. Our requirements are:-
- A good sized desk for Tony to be able to spread his plans out.
- A space for our books and magazines.
- Storage for my many craft bits and pieces and for all our business accounting paperwork.
- Storage for office stationery
- Space for a large printer to be stored out of sight.
- And finally we want the office to not only be functional but also beautiful.
The before of the office makeover
Planning the office makeover
The first and most important part of any renovation is planning. I made a list of all the items we needed to store and the size of the space required. This can be a time consuming process but trust me doing this will in the long run give you a much better result. For this room we felt that the best way to customise our storage is to remove the existing built in closet and replace it with custom built cabinetry. That way we can make allowances for all the items we need to store and make sure that the shelves are built appropriately. Especially for items like the large printer.
Designing the office makeover
Like the rest of the renovations we have done so far we are wanting to go for a very classic style, we don’t want to have to be redoing this in 5 years time!!! However we also wanted it to feel stylish. The design items I wanted to include in this makeover were:-
- Custom builtins to hide away items that can make the space look too cluttered
- Library for our books – we are both avid readers
- A feature wall – peel and stick wallpaper
- Large desk with good storage
- Samsung frame tv
- Large rug
- Comfortable office chair on castors
- Remote controlled roman blinds
Removing everything from the office
This part took forever because this little space was filled with so much stuff. I don’t bother sorting as I empty a room because I know I’m more inspired to cull and organise once the room is done. We also removed the existing wardrobe which was completely unsuitable for office storage.
Reconstructing the office
We love this part of a renovation. Rebuilding a space and turning it in to something new and hopefully beautiful.
Step one was to extend the timber flooring into the wardrobe cavity so that the new cabinetry would sit level with the rest of the flooring. Tony designed and constructed the cabinets using Melamine sheets from Bunnings. The sheets already had the shelving holes predrilled which also made it a bit easier. We did the cabinets in two parts as we knew there would be a lot of weight on the shelves.
We also added power in to the cabinet so that we can store the printer on a pull out shelf.
As this room was small we wanted to add some beautiful features without intruding on the space so we chose two different wall treatments. One was peel and stick wallpaper from Olive et Oriel and the other was VJ board.
I chose a pineapple pattern for the wallpaper which was still very neutral but still gave the space a bit of a kick. Tony handmade the VJ board so that we could have narrow gaps.
The finishing touches
Once we had finished all the painting it was time to put all the pretty things in. We ordered a library for one of the walls as we both love books and wanted somewhere to store them as well as display them.
We had doors made for the wardrobe so that they were same profile as our laundry cabinetry which is close by.
We added beautiful remote controlled roman blinds from Blinds on Line.
A rug for under the desk from Temple & Webster.
We also replaced the fan with a new pendant light which we also found at Temple & Webster.
The beautiful library came from Eureka Street Furniture.
The office desk had to be large and full of storage. We looked at various alternatives but they were really expensive. Facebook Marketplace to the rescue! We found the perfect desk for $80 and it just needed some love. I will do a separate post on the changes we made to the desk.
This little office is now such a usable space. The storage works brilliantly for all we need to store.
I hope you like the changes we’ve made. If you would like to see another room makeover we recently did our living room and you can see the beautiful cabinets we built here.
