It's finally time to wrap up this One Room Challenge guest series and reveal our home office! I love how it turned out! When I changed my work status from part time to full time getting this space finished became a priority for me. When I'm not at an event, I work from home so having a nice, functional space was a must. I also have to keep lots and lots of marketing materials for work so storage and organization needed to be addressed as well.
If you want to see the week by week you can find all the details here: Week One, Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Five, Week Six.
The largest project was to add French doors to the opening so that I had the option of closing off the space. As I stated in Week Two, this space was originally designed as a formal living room. We really have no need for a formal living room and it was in the perfect location for a home office. The opening was about 8 feet wide so in addition to the French doors we also had to add side panels to fill the space. We looked at several door options, but ended up going with traditional French doors to keep with the look and style of the home. You can see a before and my husband's DIY installation of the doors here.
Next up was storage. There is no closet in this room, so I needed to create space to store my marketing materials and other office supplies. These storage boxes and magazine files from Ikea work perfect on the shelves and I use every single one of them.
We also decided to make doors for the bottom section of the shelving units to hide all the supplies. We tried to keep the style of the doors the same as the front of the desk...a simple shaker style cabinet front. The desk I also found at Ikea. And besides the million pieces it comes in, I love it. It's sturdy and has good storage space. You can see how my husband made the shelving cabinet doors here.
And next up are a few before pictures so you can really see how far this space came. The first two are right when we moved in.
This picture below was shortly after we moved in and painted the walls. The space looked cute, but it really was not set up to work well and store materials. The file cabinets facing out were not ideal either, but made the room look presentable.
And I included this picture below to show you how some of the furniture looked before we painted it. The shelving units we have had for over 16 yrs. They are two of the first pieces of furniture we bought for our first home from Dillards, ha! Originally, they were part of a three piece entertainment set and it had an armoire in the center of the shelves that stored our old tube TV. They are actually really well made and have been moved around a lot, but they have held up so well. The file cabinets were once black and we also painted those white as well. They are from Pottery Barn and you can actually buy them in white. So after I bought them in black and then asked my husband to paint them white only a few short months later, you can image the look I got :) I cringe when I look at this set up below...it was sooooo bad!
And so much better below...
I opened up the front door when I photographed this room to bring in more natural light and this girl loved sitting and watching out the door.
We also changed the light in the front entry, which you can see a peek of below. It's the same lantern light that was once our kitchen at our old home and also over our breakfast table in this home. When I remodeled our kitchen in the Spring ORC, I changed out the breakfast light with the gold lantern and we moved this light in here. So it has definitely been around. I still really love the look of it and I think we finally found it's permanent home (for now :)
And the finishing touches in this space were the new light, the artwork, rug and hardware. I love how it all came together. It's so nice having it finished especially being the first room when you enter our home.
gray desk, desk chair, desk chair (similar), artwork, office rug, light fixture, knobs, storage bins, storage magazine files, picture frames, white file cabinets, lamp (similar), entry lantern