Home Office Update On A Shoestring Budget
My husband and I (like many people) have a workspace at home. This is ideal for working from home (obvious) but on the days we both work from home – it’s not ideal when you only have one desk…as in only one person at a time can work there. I find that one of us ends up at the dining table and my work stuff (laptop, papers, plans, sample etc) ends up being in my bedroom when I ‘pack away’. Knowing we would both be doing more work from home this year we had to come up with a better scenario. My husband also just bought himself a new Mac desktop. This meant it was permanently set up and I couldn’t move it out of the way when I wanted to work at the desk. So clearly we needed to change things.
Our home office set up is in a studio that is separate to our house…and it also doubles as storage (we only have a carport). With 4 kids and no garage, we find we have lots of things that need to be stored. We had a single desk in a corner of this space but it was poorly organised, messy and we both had stuff everywhere…..which made it so unappealing to me to work from there. It looked a bit like this..
This is not it (wish I took a photo of it before I started this little project) but it’s a close resemblance. I couldn’t even call it organised chaos…my husband probably would. My stuff was shoved into a few tiny places and it was less than ideal.
So, after a thorough clean out, I looked at reorganising the storage so we could have a more open works pace. It needed to allow us to both work at the desk at the same time and to be large enough to spread out plans for projects. My husband is a landscaper and he works from plans every day so it was just as important to him to have more space as it was to me.
Our studio is 3.5m wide by 5m long (approximately) so I reorganised things so we could have a desk that ran the width of the studio. The other walls of the studio contain shelving for our ‘stuff’ while we now have a clear and open work space at the end of the studio.
In not wanting to spend too much money I went to ikea and bought three sets of the Alex drawers and two Linnmon desk tops. These formed our double work desk. I got two super cute Hektar lamps too to go on our desk – game changer when you are used to working with poor lighting.
We then went to Bunnings for shelving to go above each desk (either side of a central window) and I got to work styling the shelves up with things I already had at home, including cute baskets for samples, books I like to use and other odds and ends I had lying around.
The other addition was these tan leather look desk chairs from Kmart. Now I would love a proper tan leather desk chair and for my clients would always recommend a high-quality item first. If the budget is small though, I can’t see anything wrong with these chairs from Kmart. They look great and are comfortable too.
We now have more storage and space than ever and a work space we both like to be in. It has made such a difference to us on our work from home days and really didn’t cost the earth to do. Here are a few pics of how it looks now. I hope it inspires you to rework your own home office/work space.
His side - complete with some kids artworks, pottery, baskets and other bits and bobs we already had.
My side - again dressed up with some art, baskets and things I had. I also have a stack of magazines and books I like to look at for inspiration close by. So far this set up has worked really well for me.
Both sides together. The extra long desk space has been so good and now we can both work at the same time. I might put something on that window, just for aesthetics…am thinking of a timber roller blind perhaps??
