7 Tips to Create a Chic Office Space: How to Organize Your Stuff and Make it Look Beautiful

Feb 18, 2013 | Fashion

I’m in the middle of a huge (and hugely stressful!) home office makeover.

Since leaving my job in late January to focus more on my blog and other projects I’m working on, for the first time in 7 months I am now spending the majority of my time at home.  For the first time in my I am lucky enough to live in a home that has an extra bedroom – which my husband and I have turned into our shared home office.  (Up until we moved here I’ve been using my computer on tiny desks, shared desks, even the corner of my bed because there was no space for it.  I was thrilled to have found a house that had an extra bedroom where I could finally have a dedicated space to work!)

My husband watches Stargate re-runs and plays marathon sessions of Warcraft there.  And once every couple months dabbles on his flight simulator.  [He is a pilot instructor, so it’s not an entirely random pursuit.]

I work.  It’s where I blog, DIY, photograph projects, sew and mend, and think up new ideas.  To me, it’s the hub of everything I do.

Whilst working at my job I had to bring my laptop into work constantly, so I would come home with it and simply put it on the dining room table to work, then pack it up and get ready to take it away again.  Now that I am working out of home again, I don’t need to take my laptop anywhere – and we need our dining room table back.  So I went to move it back into the office…and had a bit of a mini-meltdown last month.

Where I’ve had my laptop for years.  Pretty horrible, right?

I’ve always hated how our home office looks.  The walls are brown…a horrible pinky-brown that reminds me of cat puke.  And it’s crammed with stuff!  I can’t focus.  There’s no space to work.  I’ve neglected cleaning up and organizing it for months, even leaving some boxes in the same state they were when we moved in: full of jumbled, unsorted contents.  There’s no color scheme or place for your eyes to land.  And in a jumbled up, scattered place like this, I can’t be creative or think up anything new.  It’s all my fault for just throwing stuff in there as I go.  So I had a meltdown, refused to enter the room, and spent about 3 hours staring at it from the hallway, trying to figure out what to do.

(Plus, I can’t work facing the same way as World of Warcraft.  I can’t tell my husband this – but there’s nothing more distracting than trying to update this blog and out of the corner of my eye seeing a bunch of warlocks gang up on the undead, beating them to a pulp.  Or catching some flight training video of a crash re-enactment with a plane full of screaming people hurtling towards the alligator-infested Florida swamps.  Nosiree, there’s no way I can get anything done in this current setup.)

But what makes a good office design?  And what to do about my mess?  I’ve been searching online, and analyzing tons of photos for weeks to find out the answers to this.  And here’s what I’ve discovered are the keys to making your own space beautiful, calming, and inspiring: (more…)