The Perfect Home Office

From apartmenttherapy.com

So with the new Uni semester starting next week, I've been in daydreaming of the perfect home office.
I have a head (and Pinterest board) filled with airy, inspiring, beautiful work spaces and I'm itching to make over the one we have.

We bought with us from our first apartment an IKEA expedit desk set up and a small 4x4 cube and we've had that set up for the past few months. It's served well, but we originally bought it to double as a dining table in our first apartment, which had one bedroom and an open plan living/dining/kitchen space so we got the dark brown/black colour to match with the other furniture we already had in that big room.

Now in our new apartment we have a whole room we can use as an office, which is obviously awesome, but comes with a different set of challenges. Its a little boxy room in the middle of the apartment with no windows to the outside (though it has a cut-out in the wall into the sunken lounge room and gets a bit of natural light from the balcony doors. It's a really awkward room, because the stairs climb over the top of it creating a weird bulkhead in one corner, and a low recessed mirrored cupboard  into the wall underneath it. There's a massive almost floor to ceiling wardrobe that came with the place. It was originally a fairly ugly cheap orange-y wood, but I've since painted it the same white that we used on all the walls, so it looks more built in now and it's helped to lighten the place up a bit. Then there's an inward opening door on another wall, and a massive cut out window on a third. It's hard to picture, but super awkward to furnish nicely.

Its such a small room its hard to take pictures, but this gives you an idea of the giant cupboard (now white like the walls) and the stairway bulkhead thing plus weird mirrored sliding doors underneath it. Plus big dark shelving...functional but not very pretty.

So I've been dreaming of banishing the heavy dark bookshelves and desk and bringing in airy, white instead. Maybe something tall and slim for that nook between the wardrobe and stairs. Most of our books are in the lounge room, so the office just needs to hold our paperwork, my uni textbooks and resources, plus space for the printer and a desk we can sit at with laptops. We don't have a desktop computer, and the storage should be enough that we can stash away the odds and ends electrical stuff, x-rays, spare picture frames etc which are clogging up the shelves. I feel like one carefully sized bookshelf should hold all it needs to and then I have this possibly crazy idea that a tulip table might work for us to sit at.

This blog post from Everygirl has some good ideas...plus the cover image is pretty close to what I was imagining. Take a look:

Photo from theeverygirl.com - love the replica tulip table, light and airy walls and breezy shelving. Not so sure about all the pink and the gold chair...needs to be a bit more unisex for R to be comfortable in it.

Tulip table desk set up. I love this so much. Would look perfect with my little pink laptop instead of the big monitor here. Image via littlegreennotebook.blogspot.com.au.

I'm still trying to figure out the positioning of everything in the room though. Frustratingly, the measurements of the little nooks and wall edges I would like fill with bookcases are weird sizes and to my go-to Ikea bookcases don't fit properly. Sydney is also weirdly devoid of affordable furniture that doesn't look awful. 

If I do go with the tulip table idea, I will probably get the Ikea version though. It's plastic, but I don't really want to splash out on a marble replica version for an office, plus it's light enough to move around and be used on the balcony as a dining table sometimes too. 

And since I want to do it all in one clean sweep I need to wait until I have a little more moolah stashed away to take a shopping trip, a clear plan in place and a weekend free of uni work to put it all together. I'll keep you posted as soon as I get around to it!

You can see the rest of my Home Office Pinterest board here. Other projects in the works: Finally fix my failing balcony and figure out what do with my minimalist bedroom that looks more empty than it does curated and chic.