Office Space at Home- Spare Room Makeover Blog

Are you in need of an office space at home right now? Do you have a room that’s just sitting there and isn’t being utilized to its potential?

We answered YES to both of those questions recently. So we changed one of our spare rooms into an office space using only what we already had at home.

We’ve had this spare room that we didn’t really use. We just threw in a bed and an extra couch we had just to fill up the room and use if anyone came to stay with us.

It started to somehow collect all of the things we wanted to incorporate into our home but didn’t have the time or budget to commit to. So here we had a room full of potential possibilities, but no actions.

Due to COVID-19, we’re spending a lot of time at home right now. So we thought this would be a good opportunity to tackle some projects. Since we aren’t using this spare room as a guest room often enough, we’ve decided to change it up and create a man cave/office space for my husband.

My husband, David, bought our house before we were married and when it was just him. It had little furniture and hardly any decor. Anything that was here was all man. You wouldn’t have seen a flower or girly color in any part of the house. Then I moved in…

I brought along all my furniture and decor from my previous home and we filled the spaces. Using my resourceful shopping tricks I’ve worked with every room and added touches here and there to update each room.

But, there are flowers. Actually our whole bathroom is a lavender theme so it has a lot of purple. Our kitchen is a lemon theme so it has quite a bit of yellow. We have flowers. Not an overwhelming amount, but the house sure does not look as masculine as it used to.

OFFICE SPACE AT HOME

So I thought we needed a room specifically for David. No girly touches. No flowers. A room that is special for him where he could put all of his things and we could decorate it just how he likes it. Ideally, I’d love to have an actual man cave, but our house just isn’t set up for it. So this room will have to work for now for an office space at home.

So because of COVID-19, there aren’t a lot of stores open right now. We were able to get paint while out on our grocery run but in order to fill the room, we had to rely on using only items that we had.

I’m going to take you through the process on what we did to create this office space at home. I’ll show you the embarrassing before photos, what we did to create the space, what we used and share our after photos as well.

Please remember that our goal was to only use what we currently had and make the best of it. So while it’s not magazine-worthy, it is functional for us and I hope this inspires you to create a functional, budget-friendly space in your own home.

BEFORE

I hate to even show these pictures. But just remember, we had no plan for this room and it was a collect-all room to which the door was always closed. No one ever saw it. And on the rare occasion we did have someone over to stay, I cleaned it up and found other hiding spots for these items.

But you can look closely at some of the things that were on the couch and bed and in the end see that we used a lot of them for this room. I always had a plan to use these things in this room but it just wasn’t executed until now. A lot of it was just needing to hang things up but not wanting to hang them up until we painted the room.

Do you have projects like that? Where you have a plan, but you can’t do this until you do this and things just sit there because you can’t get to this or this.

Just do it! Things won’t always be perfect and will always need a little improvement, but things look way better half done than piled up. Clearly, I’m still trying to teach myself that lesson.

PAINT

So the first thing we did was take everything out of the room, tape and wipe down the walls, put newspaper all over the floor and then we painted the walls. We decided to paint the walls Grey Mist by Behr Paint.

We wanted something neutral in case we use this room for something else later on down the road. Plus the baby blue had to go. That was a color chosen by the previous owners. Since we didn’t use the room a whole lot, we just hadn’t focused our attention on painting it.

I wanted a light grey but not so light that it looked white. When we started painting, it was looking really dark. I wanted to go back to the store and get something new. It was going on way too dark and paint usually dries even darker, right? Wrong, apparently. This dried perfectly!

SET IT UP

After the paint was dry, we moved in all the big furniture. We’re keeping the blue couch in there for now. The only desk we had was my painting desk so we put that underneath the window.

Next, we hung up big pictures first and then found spots for all the smaller decor pieces he wanted in the room.

The chair at the desk is actually a spare that belongs to our kitchen table. We spray painted it black to match the decor in here. Ideally, we’d have more than two curtains. When stores open back up we’ll find an actual area rug. But this little one we just happened to have and I needed a spot for it so I just threw it in here to add a little more to the room. But it will not be staying.

Our plan is to build a corner desk to go between the two windows. We’re hoping to build a blanket ladder to hang the blanket that is currently on the couch.

Things take progress. In our house, rooms are never done. Being on a budget, we probably wouldn’t have been able to just drop the money down to fill this room with exactly what we want this same day anyway. We used what we already had and made the best of it. We’ll slowly update it and get it to be just how we like it. And when we do, I’ll update you here as well.

For now, we’ve created an office space at home for my husband that he enjoys and will use which ultimately was our goal. So goal complete!

Conclusion

I hope this inspires you to see beyond the imperfections in your own home and see the potential with items you already have. It would be nice to have a picture-perfect home, but in reality we can’t all afford that with our budgets. There are definitely some affordable options to update the look of your home, but for the most part, we have to use what we have and make the best of it.

I challenge you to do just that.

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