Sunday 4 June 2017

Making a study nook (or more commonly known as a desk in an underused space!)

It seems like everywhere you look (if you look at home improvement programs, or decorating magazines) there is something about a "study nook".  So when I came to the conclusion that doing my work spread out all over the dining room table, and keeping work stuff in four different places in the house and carrying the printer up and downstairs to use it wasn't all that practical, I decided I could make a study nook too.  

We actually had the perfect place for it.  After getting our balcony all fixed up off our upstairs bedroom (see the post about that here I now feel much more likely to actually use the space and have the french doors open.  Well, I will when it is warmer anyway.  And in the walkway to the balcony was a reasonably large area of dead space.  








The layout was measured up - 207cm long and 193cm wide - so not exactly huge, but certainly enough.  After all I've seen bedrooms in some innerwest terraces that are not all that much bigger!


So I decided all I needed to do was paint the space up and get some furniture.  And bingo, work space that doesn't take up all of the room in the house.


Of course I always forget that painting isn't that easy!  Especially in this room with our unusually shaped ceiling.  Being an old workers cottage we have an extremely steep pitched roof, and the internal ceiling in our bedroom has the internal sloping walls.  So I had to contend with high and strange shaped ceilings.  Plus the previous owners had unusual taste in colours - at least this part was only a mint green before, and not the very dark grey or green that is on the other walls.


One bonus was that the skirting boards had already been taken off when the builders took the floor up for the balcony building- so I could paint in the knowledge we will be putting new white skirting boards on later.


One undercoat and two coats of colour later, I have finished the painting.  I used the same colour as we used for all the walls downstairs, mainly because I had a few litres left.  Of course, I did run out of it when I was halfway through the second coat which caused a mad rush off to buy more. 





It was quite good as I had a bit of a deadline and impetus to finish - I figured fitting out my home office with furniture would be tax deductible and I wanted to claim it in the 2015-2016 tax year - so all had to be done and ready for furniture before the last weekend in June!   Mind you I have now taken almost a year to finish my post!


I used a small table that we had downstairs as a general rubbish collection table and have put it in the space for a desk.  One nice new office chair, a filing cabinet that doubles as the printer stand and a good desk lamp later and voila, my study nook is ready.  Ok, so it's not exactly going to win any prizes for styling and I'm sure that it would ripped apart as boring on any home improvement show, but I'm really happy with the result, and with the fact that now all my work stuff is stored in one place and I can actually find things!





And on a gloriously sunny winter's day like today (these photos are hot off my phone from today!) it's not too bad a spot to sit and do some work - or some blog posts.