Office Remodel 2010

Remember last year's Home Improvement Goals? I'm proud to say that all three projects were completed in 2009. I'll go ahead and give ourselves a big pat on the back for that.

The 2009 Home Improvement Goals were to pretty up the main bathroom, replace the dilapidated dresser in the kids' room with shelving, and create more toy storage for the living room. Big shout out to my awesome Father in Law for the kids' room shelves and living room toy cubbies. He's definitely been a big blessing!

This year's Big Home Improvement Project is the Office Remodel. We've talked about it for awhile now and this is the year it will happen. Currently our third bedroom functions as an office/guest room/storage room. David works from home at least two days a week and takes a zillion phone calls/meetings and thus needs to be able to shut the door to keep the kids' noise to a dull roar. If you work from home with small children you'll know what I mean. One time David was on a phone meeting with a big wig and was asked if he had a parrot. Actually it was Ethan.

The office function is the room's primary use at the moment. The office furniture includes a desk and two drawer filing cabinet. The wood swivel office chair came from David's grandparents and has sentimental value but could really use some TLC.

The full sized guest bed takes up more then half the available floor space but is only used a few times a year. We would like to be able to accommodate guests, but it seems kind of silly to sacrifice the majority of the space for a guest bed that is used infrequently. The bed frame is an antique, it belonged to my great great grandparents? It's metal and has been painted more times then I can count. It's been painted white ever since I inherited it 20 years ago. I'm not willing to part with the bed frame so we'll probably have to store it in the garage and get rid of the mattresses. In it's place we're envisioning a futon.

The last function of the room is storage, which is what the entire closet and under (ok, and on top of) the bed is for. We also have the Rock Band drums and a banana chair in there as well. The closet could definitely use some more organizing and possibly more shelves. It houses all of my gift wrapping supplies, craft supplies, art supplies (once upon a time I actually enjoyed water colors, batiking, and block printing), sewing supplies (I pretend I can sew), the kids' outgrown clothes in plastic tubs waiting for Ebay, and all my shipping supplies.

I have a vision of what the room could look like if I had no budget and my husband kept his opinions to himself. Since that is not the world I live in I will give up my vision of office/guest room/storage room perfection and work on being practical.

Here's what I'm thinking so far:

*Replace the full sized bed with nice futon (the kind that my Mom won't complain about sleeping on)
*Replace the desk with work surface that will accommodate two people. Thinking about using a solid core door over the filing cabinet with table legs on the other end.
*Buy another office chair
*Buy two long Ikea shelves for the wall
*Buy new desktop computer, or a laptop with docking station and a nice monitor. I am tired of trying to edit photos on a laptop screen!
*Find some cheap storage solutions to hold office supplies on the shelves.

I'd really like to keep our budget for the furniture as low as possible because this is a temporary solution that will hopefully last us 3-4 years. By that time we will either be moving to a larger home or we will be needing to give the room to Ethan. That means recycling what we have, buying used, and finding frugal solutions. David will have a lot more imput on the computer decision since he's much more up to date on such things then I am. We haven't owned a desktop in a long time, the last laptop we bought was when I was pregnant with Grace in spring of 2005 so we're due!

Here's a door desk that looks super cool. The legs came from Ikea. Unfortunately the cool legs take up too much leg room and would make it hard to seat two people at once. Plus they're not the same height as our 29" high filing cabinet.

Since function is more important then form in this case I'm thinking we'll use our ugly filing cabinet (refinished and painted of course!) on one end of the desk and use these boring Ikea table legs on the other side so there's enough room for two chairs at the desk. These are adjustable height and cost $30 apiece. Maybe I can find them cheaper somewhere, I don't know. I'll also need to buy a solid core door and have about 6" cut off to make a 30" deep desktop. That shouldn't cost too much.

If I was designing this room to simply be pretty I'd be buying cute office chairs like this one:

But we'd like to keep the wooden office chair so I'll probably try to refinish it, and David wants one of these soft of ugly but much more comfortable chairs:

I'll probably lose that battle so be prepared for the less cute but more comfortable and mismatching chairs. I'm still working on coming to terms with it myself.

Here's a photo of the type of futon I'll be hunting Craigslist for:

That's all I have figured out so far. As for colors etc. I haven't quite decided. The artwork on the walls at the moment are posters for the rodeos we attend each year and a painting of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's outdoor Elizabethan Theater. They may or may not stay. My husband will probably want the rodeo posters to stay, but they don't really go with the aqua, orange, lime, color scheme I have in my head. The walls are currently painted a light blue which I like and don't really feel like painting.

I'd love to hear any suggestions on how to accomplish this project without breaking the bank!