Home office with table being used as a desk in the foreground. A laptop and monitor are on the desk with a view of the back of the monitor. A bookshelf filled with books is in the background and a pastel nature scene hangs on the wall above the bookshelf. The walls of the office are light turquoise with white wainscotting.
design family home projects work in progress

New Home Office

by Mary

Work continues apace in our new-to-us home, which was built in the 1960s. One of my first orders of business was to set up a home office.

We have four bedrooms in the house. I chose the one I wanted as an office and then promptly set up a temporary office in the bedroom across the hall. I had work to do before moving into my room of choice.

The day we moved in, Hubby yanked the carpeting out of the room I wanted for an office. He wanted to see what the floors looked like underneath. We suspected they were wood based on the fact that there was wood flooring in the closet and the floor creaked like wood. We were correct in our assumption.

View inside bedroom with bundles of old carpeting and carpet pad on the wood floor. A double window with curtains is on the wall on the right half of the image. A white ceiling fan is at the top.
Bedroom that will become my new home office with carpeting ripped up to reveal wood floor. December 2022.

I dragged the carpet and carpet pad down to the garage and cleaned up the dirt, staples, and other debris left behind from the carpet removal. I also thoroughly scrubbed the floor.

View of wood floor after carpet removal and cleaning. White wainscotting can be seen in the background.
Newly cleaned wood floor in my future home office, December 29, 2022.

I removed the curtains along with the white shelves that had been mounted on the wall. Removing the shelves revealed the previous paint color – a dark lavender. Gray had been painted over this. In fact, most of the interior of the house had been painted in two slightly different colors of gray, which made me think of all the gray house interiors we had seen on Zillow while we were house hunting. There were so many that we took to calling the color “Zillow Gray.” While the advice of realtors is to paint homes a neutral color in order to help them sell more quickly, do we all need to use gray? How depressing! That was going to change. And I knew the color I wanted to use with the existing white wainscotting: a light, cheery turquoise.

Bedroom being painted for a home office. The floor is covered with a white dropcloth and has a paint tray and roller, containers of paint, and a small ladder scattered about. The wall on the right back of the image features a double window and is painted light turquoise. The wall on the back left is partially painted light turquoise over the existing gray paint. White wainscotting surrounds the bottom of the walls.
In the process of painting my home office, January 2023.

I patched holes in the walls and took a couple of weekends to paint. We switched out the lighting and brought in a turquoise and white rug that we had used in our dining room in the old house.

I dragged in my desk and bookshelf from the other room, then set up my computer. I spent a considerable amount of time unpacking my books (not all of them, by any means) and arranging them on the bookshelf with my office supplies.

I set my desk up so that I could both look out the door and the windows, enjoying the view of birds and the street in front of our house for a week before we put up curtains. We hung the curtains this past weekend, as well as a pastel drawn by Wes Sod that was given to us by Erik’s sister. The curtains are lightweight and fairly sheer, so I can pull them back when I want to look out the window.

Here is the result of our work over the past several weeks. Presto, change-o, a delightful home office!

Home office with table being used as a desk in the foreground. A laptop and monitor are on the desk with a view of the back of the monitor. A bookshelf filled with books is in the background and a pastel nature scene hangs on the wall above the bookshelf. The walls of the office are light turquoise with white wainscotting.
My new home office, January 2023.
Wide-angle view of home office with table holding computer equipment in the back center of the photo, corner of a light, wood bookcase in the lower left corner, windows covered in sheer curtains in the back right, with a turquoise and white diamond-patterned rug on the floor.
Wide-angle view of my new home office, showing the desk, bookshelf, rug, and new curtains, January 2023.
Wide-angle view of home office with desk filled with computer equipment in the right center of the room and a bookshelf in the left back. A turquoise and white rug in a diamond pattern is on the floor. A small, round ceiling light is in the upper center-left of the photo.
Wide-angle view of my home office looking at the desk and bookshelf, January 2023.

All that’s left is to bring in a couple more bookshelves and books and to figure out how to manage all those computer cords.

We’ll also be deciding which room to transform with fresh paint next.