We did it: we finally have a home office space! And yes, it’s in a closet. We affectionately dubbed it the “cloffice.”

I’ll be honest: I’m really proud of how this turned out. This little project has solved SO many problems for us! My quality of life and efficiency has gone up so much since we finally solved this years-long no-office dilemma!

Yes, it’s a bit claustrophobic I suppose, but it works beautifully for us. This was SO worth it, it was actually really easy to put together and it has such a massive impact on our quality of life and effective use of space! This home has quite a few closets, and we’ve always had an ugly office desk sitting in our living room the last several years. We couldn’t figure out a better way though since we’ve never had enough rooms for an office — our son’s room already doubles as a guest room! And then I had a stroke of genius while scrolling through Pinterest late one night while Andrew was out of town (ha). It only took some paint, a few shelves, and some stick-on battery-powered click lamps, plus a trip to IKEA and the hand-me-down-store-of-mom-and-dad for some organizational items. And voilà! 

I just LOVE how it turned out. It would be fun to do some removable wall paper or something to pretty it up, but already it is so convenient and neat. Everything is in one spot and we have so much more space in our living room to just breathe and enjoy family time. Work is contained to this tidy little space.

A few notes on what we did:

• There were already brackets for four shelves, so we just re-purposed one of them for the desktop and added an extra one for the smaller shelf. I measured the width and had boards cut, then painted the shelf ones. Boom, done. (Of course I first had to empty the closet and repaint it too, since we’ve been repainting the whole house… but it was a quick enough fix.)
• We took the door off. I wouldn’t recommend leaving it if you’re going to have a computer in there and other electronics, they need room to breathe. We could put a tension rod and curtain to close it off if we wanted, but this space is pretty well-organized so looking at when I’m coming down the hallway doesn’t really bug me. 
• We picked up the filing slots and bar with cups for pens from IKEA, as well as the white and gray floral bins above. The click lights are a battery-powered Walmart find. The batteries don’t last terribly long though so don’t forget to turn them off when not in use!
• I used this cord protector kit (which I’ve also used in our daughter’s room in the past — it’s awesome for baby-proofing wires) to route the cord up to the printer on the first shelf, and I drilled a hole through that shelf for it.
• Right now the computer is plugged in to an outlet just on the other side of the wall but we’re getting an outlet put in directly there so we don’t have to worry about Jonas deciding to unplug our computer!

Someday if we have a dedicated guest room, I’d love to do this in a full-width double closet for a craft room/office type of space like this or this… once again, Pinterest sure has me dreaming!

Anyway, there you have it: our new closet office!