Downstairs Office Budget Refresh - The Plan

You may be thinking that we just did an office refresh – and you would be right! I just finished refreshing my new office upstairs and now its time to refresh this space to fit Nathan’s office needs. The room that will be Nathan’s new office has been repurposed a few times as we have evolved in our home. It’s been a den then transitioned into my office during COVID work from home and now it will be Nathan’s office. Designing a home to fit our needs never ends.

Below are a few images of the prior design iterations in this room. The room has come a long way, but it is time to evolve again.

For this design we are planning to add shelving for books, float the desk, paint and even redo the fireplace surround.

When we first started planning the design of the room we went to what I’ll call the extreme of what we wanted for the space – built in book shelves, new fireplace tile, building a desk, and a new chair. Ideally, this would all be great in the space and something we would like to do, but it was going to cost more money than we would like to spend on this room. We are aiming to keep total costs of new items purchased (including paint and supplies) below $400, max, hopefully less than this though. That may seem like a tiny budget to some and an outrageous budget to others, but it’s what we’re comfortable with.

The Plan

So we went back to the drawing boarding and thought about all of the things we really wanted in the space:

A lighter paint color
Float the desk in front of the fireplace
Shelves for books
A chair for reading
Drawer storage for office stuff

We realized we could accomplish what we want by getting a little creative and mostly using items we already have in the house. Since I like to thrift and find things on Facebook Marketplace we do have a few extra furniture pieces around the house – we have a dresser that would be great office storage, a desk that could work (maybe we just need to refinish it!), and we have a chair that’s not really used in our living room that we could move to the office. Rethinking what you already have and shopping your own home first can sometimes surprise you!

Instead of built-in book shelves we are planning to add floating shelves for book storage which will be more cost effective and take much less time to install. We do plan to refinish our existing fireplace surround and hopefully make it look like a beautiful cast stone surround.