Creating a Home Office

Dan works from home. Our house technically has three bedrooms but we took the doors off of one of them and turned it into the headquarters for Young Life Ross County.

YLRC Headquarters. Where Dan and his Associates (pictured, center) spend a lot of time.

We love our house a lot but we've pretty much exhausted all of the space inside of it. We don't just have empty rooms for storage or anything. A few months ago I was offered a new job at OCU and after a lot of prayer and deliberation, I decided to take it. I'm putting my Environmental Science degree to good use as their Director of Marketing (hoping that people see what a joke this is). I mostly like my new job even though I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time, but that is an entirely different post. Anyway, with this new job came the offer of working from home about half the time. This was very exciting to me, especially since I spend basically an hour a day getting to and from work. But the only issue is that I had no where to work from home. Dan is in his office most of the day and there really isn't room for another person in there.

So we were tasked with the idea of creating a space for me to work from on very limited funds. We've been saving a bunch of our money for re-doing our backyard swamp next month (maybe my next blog post will go through this project?) and didn't want to use any swamp money for another office.

We eventually decide to put my office in... drum roll please... our unfinished basement! As gross as that sounds, I don't think it turned out too bad. And we did it ALL for $70!

Here's a nice blurry picture of the general space

Our basement is split into thirds. One third is our laundry room. We use the second third for storage. And then we turned this third into the basement office, or boffice as I like to refer to it. 

It was actually pretty easy to do all this. The previous owner of our house started finishing the basement but (obviously) didn't get very far. One thing that they did do though is install awesome reclaimed barn wood. It's on one main wall and lines our stairs leading to the basement. And they wired it, so it already had outlets and whatnot installed. Bless them. 

But the rest of the walls were kinda gross. Nothing too bad, they just had some water stains. So we bought some basement paint from Lowe's that seals off water and all that other good basement-y stuff and did two coats. You can't tell too much in the pictures but it's a soft blue. So it added some color to my boffice.

The floor really isn't too bad (for an unfinished basement, of course). It's concrete but it was painted a nice blueish gray before we moved in. Although it's not the worst, I thought a rug would make the space much more homey and much less prisony. Shout out to my mama for buying me this rug as a congratulations gift!

The next thing that I tackled were the windows. They're just typical basement windows so I figured it couldn't be too hard to make my own curtains. I went to Hobby Lobby, spent $10 on a fabric I liked, cut it and hemmed it. I'm really not good at sewing but I figured nobody would be closely examining my curtains, right? So as long as you don't get too close, I think they turned out pretty good.

Next, we basically just moved a bunch of stuff from the storage section of our basement to the boffice section. We had an extra sofa, squishy chair, coffee table and tv and figured that we could make some soft of living-room-situation out of those. So we did, even though absolutely none of it matches. And I took one of my cup cake stands from our wedding and attached it to our wall. It works, right? Sure. Just go with it.

Finally, I tackled my actual office area which is, you know, kind of the reason we did this whole thing in the first place. My sister-in-law moved across town back in November, which was right when I took my new job and figured out that I would be working from home. She was getting rid of a bunch of things in the move including her old, crappy desk. She gave it to me instead of trashing it so I didn't have to buy a new one. We had some left over mint green-ish paint from our upstairs bathroom so I tried to paint the desk with it. I feel like that could have turned out pretty bad, but I think that it actually turned out pretty well. My mother-in-law got me that super cute bulletin board, chalk board and file organizer. I hung those bad boys up and called it a day.

So, all in all, I'd say it's not too shabby, Especially for how little money we paid. Here's a breakdown:
Wall paint: $60
Rug: free... gift from my mom
Curtains: $10
Furniture: free... old stuff we had lying around
Desk: free... took from my sister-in-law's trash pile
Cute office-y things: free... Christmas presents

But, in an attempt to be real and put the not-so-pretty stuff on the internet too, let's remember this in unfinished basement that I'm talking about here. This is what my ceiling looks like.

Yeah...

And I have this hideous fixture attached to my beautiful barnwood by the stairs. I don't even know how to go about fixing this guy.

And in case you didn't notice in the pictures, I don't have a desk chair. I've just been using one from my kitchen table. So there's that.

Cheers to cheap home renovations and mismatched furniture!