Have you ever had a vision of something that came so true to life, even you don’t believe it?! That was this Home Office for us! We came up with our concept, I drew it out on paper and after doing some research, we went to work! Keep reading to find out how we created this workspace and storage unit for only a couple hundred bucks and about 2 days worth of work!

The first thing we did was paint the room a fresh coat of white and then we settled on the color blue. We got 3 samples from The Home Depot and painted 12″ squares on the wall, so it was large enough to get a real idea of how it would look in the space. It’s a good idea to leave it up for 24 hours and check it out in the morning, afternoon and night, to truly make sure you like it in all of the lighting.

Once we picked our color, we got matte paint for the walls and a spot color chalk paint by Behr. They can color match anything, so we were able to get the wall paint and the chalk paint [for the cabinets] knowing it would be exact. The matte or satin finish helps it look more like the cabinets, as opposed to a typical eggshell, which has some sheen to it.

My drawing of our original vision…

We had to deviate from this a bit due to the vents up by the ceiling. Without moving them and affecting the HVAC system [we were not trying to make this that big of a project] we couldn’t do the bookshelves the way I wanted. We also ditched the drawers and slid the cabinets out to the side, making room for a center workspace. We figured we could swivel the chair around and that could be my blogging space at night, as I sit in bed writing this…

Cabinets:

After thinking about our needs for the cabinetry, we decided to go with typical base cabinets. We used two different widths, 18″ and 24″ cabinets. We wanted to fit our printer to be hidden in one and wanted to keep it symmetrical, so we got two of each.

One of the features of built ins, is well, being built in. This means that typically, the trim continues around the bottom of the cabinets from the adjacent walls. Once we found the cabinets we wanted, we had to elevate them off of the ground in order to create this continuous look.

Here are the frames…

You’ll have to measure out all of your factors, height of cabinet’s kickplate, height of your trim [ours was 5″ and the kickplate was 3.5″, which is average]. Rob went and got wood from Home Depot and nailed it together in a simple rectangle, the size of the cabinet base. We laid the wood down so that we had our approximate 1.5″ we needed to raise the cabinets. Once we laid them down, we positioned the cabinets on top and secured them to the base and the wall, using a screw gun. We placed the trim across the bottom of the cabinets, mitre cutting it to fit in the corners, then painted it!

We finished off all of our base trim with shoe trim or quarter round.

You can see in the middle and right photos, that we have metal brackets on the cabinet sides. These will hold the counter top for my workspace.

Countertops:

All of the wood accents in our house are pine with the same stain, Minwax Special Walnut. We spent a lot of time getting this to match the flooring, which is a totally different wood/stain combo. We ran into an issue, where we couldn’t find planks of pine deep enough to cover the space with an overhang. Rob actually had the idea to get stair treads, with the rounded front edge and use those. He had to get another plank of pine to trim and glue to the tread, to get the depth right. Once sanded and stained, you can’t even see the seam. We put it in the back and have our decor over it. We glued to counters to the top of the cabinets.

Below are the counters, prestained.

The Hardware:

I actually swapped out the hardware from my original idea. The knobs above were the first one we went with and once installed, I thought it looked cheap, so we went with old faithful and got the bras handle bar pulls, which is what we have in the kitchen and living room, but in bronze. [Linked here]. They’re great quality and we haven’t have any issues.

The shelves:

The shelving is actually a custom DIY also. We got the piping from amazon [linked here] and used pine planks that we stained, for the shelving. They’re 12″ deep by 1″ thick. They add a really nice masculine touch to the room while keeping it open and airy.

I hope you enjoyed reading how we did these and that you found some inspiration! As always, thank for reading!

XOXO

Kel