Before & After: The Husband's Office
After getting the keys to our home in May last year, we've been painting and decorating it pretty much every single month until this February. There were walls, ceilings, doors, skirting boards, picture rails, windows all to paint and at times, it really did feel endless. So after pretty much finishing everything in February, it was lovely to have no decorating to do! Until recently when I started to get the 'decorating itch' again. Painting is almost like an addiction - it's a pretty easy and relatively cheap (depending on what paint you use) task to do and in a day you can have an entirely new looking room, and I think it's this that keeps me coming back for more!
Needing to scratch my decorating itch, I gave myself a new challenge of taking our smallest bedroom and making it into an office for my husband Steve, who runs North 6 Graphic Design. Both Steve and I work from home, and whilst I have a lovely and cosy copper styled office (you can read about that makeover here), for the past year Steve has been working from the dining room table and it felt pretty unfair that he didn't have his own workspace too.
We hadn't done anything with our smallest bedroom, as it had just turned into a bit of a dumping ground, and was filled with boxes of old clothes, piles of paperwork we needed to shred and random boxes of who knows what! You know how you always seem to have those boxes when you move house that never seem to get emptied?! So, we took it upon ourselves to finally empty them and cleared the room out and it really is a perfectly sized room for an office. We live on quite a peaceful street so it's lovely and quiet and gets really nice light throughout the day.
Steve was happy to give me free reign on the room but told me he liked the industrial look and liked the idea of having a black, white and grey space. No palm trees and pineapples here then!
I created the above moodboard, which Steve was happy with, and then set to work on decorating the space. The room had the same horrible old brown carpet that was in our hallway and on our stairs so that had to go and other than painting the ceiling, walls and woodwork, we also needed to paint the old fashioned pine window.
For the walls, I chose Pencil Pot by Crown Period, which is a really nice medium grey, and we painted the ceiling in a very light grey called Smoked Glass, which was also by Crown. For the woodwork and window, we chose Hemsley's Lovington Flint, which is a range of paint I'd really recommend as it has a nice chalky finish similar to Farrow & Ball. The carpet was a roll end from a local carpet shop and if you have a small room, it's a really good idea to explore this option as you can often find good quality carpet at a much cheaper price. This cost us £50 plus fitting and it's lovely and soft and a two-tone grey colour.
After a trip to Ikea, where of course we came back with more than we went for, we sourced a desk, chair, cushions and lampshade, which all fitted into the industrial black, white and grey theme for the room. The other items of furniture for the room were things we had and needed a home for including a pouffe, which is part of our sofa set but doesn't fit in our living room, and an Ikea shelving unit, which was gathering dust somewhere!
Desk: Ikea / Chair: Ikea / Wire Mesh Organiser: Urban Outfitters (sold out) / Light: Aldi (sold out) / Pen Pot: Amara Living
Lamp Shade: Ikea
Shelving Unit: Ikea / Whiteboard: Clas Ohlsen / Cork Noticeboard: Clas Ohlsen / Bluetooth Speaker: Aldi (sold out)
For the walls, I knew I wanted a mixture of artwork, shelving and since this was a working office, some useful office wall decor. I used a black and white Oasis print we already had from the exhibition in Manchester we attended last year as a focal point for the walls and along with this ordered a black string style shelf, wire mesh stationary holder and a matching white board and pin board.
Oasis Print: Oasis.net
String style Shelves: Monoqi
The rest of the room accessories were largely items we already had, such as design focused books and music boxsets and memorabilia we've collected over the years and the Aldi lamp and bluetooth speaker and Very basket were recycled from other rooms in the house.
Basket: Very
The only thing still on our list to buy is the amazing Seletti neon number 6 light which would look great on the wall between the Oasis print and the wire mesh stationary holder.
The room has a really calm yet cosy feel to it and Steve is really happy in there. We created the whole space for under £400 and it's amazing how different the room is to before and also how much nicer it is for Steve to go into his own workspace every day. In fact, even though I love my own office, I'm slightly jealous of his cool monochrome space!
