Office Space

Well, as you now know from this post here Katie and I have officially sold this house and are onto our next adventure. But while the new house is being built there are still several projects from the old one that we’d love to bring you up to speed on. One of them being the story of how we turned a dinky little dining room into a pretty sweet and simple office space.

Now, we’ve definitely shown you this floor plan before but take a quick refresher. You’ll notice that this typical 1960s colonial has no formal place to setup a work space. What it does have is a little dining room and a huge formal living room. As you’ll recall, a few years back we rethought the floor plan and turned the living room into a larger dining room. You can read more on that here.

 

By doing so, this opened up a nice space for an office where the old dining room used to be. So after a little bit of elbow grease, refinished wooden floors, fresh coats of paint, and a ton of thought – that original floor plan started to look a little more like this.

So after focusing for months on creating a decent dining room, it was time to setup an official office.

The space started out looking like this.

 

A few of the “must-haves” on our design list were:

• Built-in double desk under that nice-sized window
• Utilize the extra dining room chairs as desk chairs – storing them in plain sight
• Bookshelf for a formal place to store books
• Cork-board for all of those little things you need to remember

DOUBLE DESK

When thinking of what would work to create a built-in-looking double desk we scrounged the internet and came across Young House Love’s desk. We really liked the direction they went with this but wanted to simplify it even more (mostly because at the time I really didn’t know what I was doing).

When we moved into the house we purchases a few of these gigantic nightstands from ikea thinking they would be awesome. They were. But they were also way too big for the room.

After a quick measurement confirmed our suspicions and we knew these would be the perfect height for a desk we bought one more (for middle support) and got to work. First was a fresh coat of paint.

Then staging the nightstands.

We snagged a piece of melamine particle board as the top. Had it cut to size at Home Depot. And screwed it in from below.

We picked up a single iconic billy bookcase form ikea and placed that along the large wall to break it up a bit.

 

Katie turned an awesome moroccan shower curtain from Target into a perfectly fitting window treatment.

 

We threw a couple chairs in there from our dining room table. And boom! We had ourselves a nifty little office with very little effort.

This was probably one of the easiest room projects that we tackled and we really dig the final result.

That “J” and “K” lettering that you see hanging there not only labels whose side is whose but also has some sentimental value. Those were the letters used as decor at our wedding.

And boom. A dining room turned office.