After working from home for more than a year due to the pandemic, we finally decided to upgrade the office! Working from home changed the way we looked at the rooms in our house and we wanted to create a multifunctional room by adding a space for an office, guests to stay, and one day grow our family!
This room was the third bedroom that we turned into an office when we moved into our house three years ago. It was the room of misfit items in our house. My husband would ask "what should I do with this?" and my response would be "put it in the office for now." Little did I know this would become the room I spent the majority of my time starting March 2020.
After discussing wanting to maximize our space we got to work. We first started by decluttering the room. After that was done and everything was organized, we made plans to turn the closet into the desk space so the rest of the room could be a second guest bedroom.
We removed the mirror sliding closet doors, all the shelving inside, and the track on the floor. The floors in our home are original to the house and were put in during the 1950s. We were worried removing the track from the closet doors would ruin the floors so we took it slow. Fortunately, the floors were in perfect condition underneath the track. We then had an outlet installed in the closet.
Pro Tip: Hire a professional to run the electrical if you are adding an outlet. This can be a dangerous task and it is better to let the professionals handle this portion of the project.
The next step was building the desk and bookshelves. We wanted to make sure the desk stretched from wall to wall and the closet already had the perfect nook for a bookshelf on each side of the desk for storage. We installed everything into the space prior to painting and wallpapering. The reason for this, we didn't want to ruin the wallpaper or paint while trying to make sure everything was cut correctly. We then uninstalled the desk and bookshelves so we could begin painting them!
Pro Tip: Always measure more than once before you start cutting and don't assume all your walls are perfectly straight. We learned closet walls are not always straight- crazy, right?! We had to make some minor adjustments to the bookshelf on one side to make sure it fit perfectly into the nook.
We wanted to add a design element that would set the desk portion of the room apart from the rest of the room but would still give a cohesive look. We discussed doing shiplap, but then ended up finding a shiplap peel and stick wallpaper from Target. This was not as easy as it sounds. We used a laser level to section out the wall to ensure the lines on the wallpaper would line up to create the shiplap look. It took 3 rolls of wallpaper to cover the space and nearly 6 hours to hang the wallpaper.
Pro Tip: When using the peel and stick wallpaper you want to pull it tight, but not too tight, or else the paper will stretch making it harder to line up designs on the wallpaper you choose. If we were to do this again we would pick a design that didn't have to match up perfectly with each roll.
Once the wallpaper was in and the desk and bookshelves had dried we were able to install these into the nook. The desk is drilled into a beam that is secured on the studs in the wall and the bookshelves are secured to the wall and sitting on the sides of the desk. We installed an LED strip above the frame to provide additional lighting into the desk space. If your space is big enough you could add a puck light or small pendant. We also installed floating shelves from Target over the desk using drywall anchors to ensure they wouldn't fall once we put decor on them.
When the desk portion of the project was complete we turned our focus to the rest of the empty room. We decided to add a trundle bed from Overstock that pulls out to be a king-size bed for guests to sleep comfortably on.
We had so much fun creating this multifunctional space and providing more room for family and friends to come to visit and a home office that I enjoy working in every single day!
Do you need help maximizing your space at home or want to create a home office you love? Be sure to reach out to Ivy Wall Interiors and we would love to help you create a beautiful and functional space!
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