Home Office: The Before

After setting up our upstairs hall bathroom, our home offices were the next highest priority rooms to work on. After all, both my husband and I had to hit the ground running, getting back to work right away after our move.

We have three bedrooms upstairs, and one really big one downstairs. Our master bedroom is upstairs, and then there is a small bedroom and a medium bedroom. My husband really wanted a room with hardwood floors, since he's doing lots of  hands on work, and so it's a lot easier to find dropped screws and small electrical components on a smooth floor. So he got the medium bedroom for his office. However, the small bedroom was just too small for me to use it as both my walk in closet bedroom and my home office. And I didn't want to have to have my closet downstairs in the really big bedroom, that would just be inconvenient. So by default, I ended up using the small bedroom upstairs as just my walk in closet, and the downstairs room is now my home office/the guest bedroom.

And it's no joke of a room, it's about 20 feet long x 12 feet wide! Here are some photos I took right after the movers had unloaded the furniture and boxes into the room. Utter chaos!

(Looking into the room from inside the doorway)

(From the far side of the room, looking toward the doorway and closet)

With only a weekend between when we arrived at our new house, and when I had to start back up working full time, I had no choice but to throw together a temporary work space, involving a card table, uncomfortable straight backed chair, two shelves shoved together, a file cabinet and a large box.

As you can see, this was not a very comfortable or ideal work area. The too high card table + kitchen chair combo made my wrists ache when typing, and even sitting on a pillow, I still had numb-ass at the end of the day. Thank goodness I only had to live with this set up for two weeks, until we were able to go to IKEA for some snazzy and inexpensive real office furniture.

And thank goodness for my view out my office window. Actually having a window and natural light makes me so happy! Especially considering back at my office in California, I couldn't see any windows from my florescent-lit cubicle.

So, that's the "before" look at my home office/guest room. Not very exciting, but every good "after" look at a room makeover deserves a look at what you're starting with. How else will you appreciate the final product? ;)

Coming up next, I DIY'd quite possibly the cheapest, ghettoest headboard ever, and the progress on my work space with my three new desks from IKEA.

Do you have a home office or work space? Do you have to share it with another functional space in your home (like I am with our guest room), or do you get to have a dedicated room to yourself?