Office Makeover

Sorry that I have been away so long!  Though I haven't mentioned it yet, Dan and I have been working here and there for weeks on an office makeover.  Our upstairs office is a room that just sort of got thrown together with every desk we have (plus a bookcase added in) without any real thought, and to be perfectly honest, I've never been happy with it.  Though Dan did an awesome job repainting it, the whole room has felt pretty cluttered and thrown together (we had three desks in there!), and we've been wanting to make some changes to it, especially since Dan works from home now.  As much as I want to get the nursery done, this room was a project that I was worried would never get done if we didn't do it now, so Dan and I have been hard at work!  Here are some before photos.

  

Not exactly the most inspiring room.  Not only is it not too attractive, it was a mess--the wooden secretary became a dumping ground for all sorts of papers, and everything felt like it was out of place.  Plus I knew that I really needed to go through things and recycle/shred a lot of unneeded papers and documents, get rid of some books, and just pare things down in general. Since we got our laptop, we haven't really been using the old desktop that I had, so we realized that could go.  We also realized that, now that we have the laptop, Dan and I are rarely in the office at the same time, so it didn't really make sense to have two chairs and so many separate work spaces.

I spent a day or two just sorting through everything.  Here's a picture of the room mid-purge, as well as a picture of the huge bag of papers that we sent to the recycling bin!

Dan and I decided a while ago that we probably just needed to get rid of all the desks and start over with something more streamlined.  The desks were just too clunky and/or impractical to make them work in such a small room.  I was also hoping that we could create work space along just one wall so we could create some space to put our futon in there.  Once the guest room was converted to the baby's room, we moved the futon to the basement.  I would never ask my guests to sleep down there, so I secretly hoped that we could make this a dual purpose room if we played our cards right!

Keeping our streamlined theme in mind, we bought some inexpensive desks and shelving at IKEA (aka my favorite place for all things house).  Dan put the desks together a few weeks ago and put up the shelving, we found new homes for the old desks using Freecycle, brought up the futon, added some of our artwork that's been collecting dust, moved some things into the closet to store, and voila!  A whole new office!

 

This room feels so different now.  It actually feels put together and cozy, things are nice and streamlined, and our artwork (which includes photos that we've taken) adds a nice personal touch.  And I love that we have a place for the futon now so our guests have a place to sleep!  The futon also gives us a nice space to sit in the office if we'd like to read, and I suspect it may also come in handy if one of us needs resting/napping space away from a crying baby!  I am planning to get some throw pillows for the futon to help cheer things up a bit more.  Ideally, I'd also like to put the items in storage on the shelves above our desk into something prettier/more streamlined (like matching storage boxes), but for now the containers that we were already using seem to be working just fine while we keep our budget in mind.

Most importantly, Dan has a nice space to work in now, with a nice open space, a plant nearby, and cheery artwork surrounding him.  I'm so happy that we took the time to get this done so he has a nice place to work!