4th bedroom into a home office!

Hey everyone!


So far... we've gone from 5 bedrooms down to 4 and to be honest, right now, we don't 4. Whilst we don't 'need' 4 bedrooms we decided to make the most of having the extra room and create a home office in our smallest 4th bedroom.

When we purchased the house the bedroom was used for a young child and with a single bed, it was the perfect size. Here's how it looked (estate agent picture).

Again, one of the issues we discovered with this bedroom was the lack of sockets (1 single I believe was all that was in this room!) The floor wasn't great either, it seemed to dip quite badly in the middle of the room meaning that heavy items we had pushed up against the walls leaned towards the centre of the room!

I had a vision for this room and was willing to 'experiment' with colour... dark ones at that (something I normally wouldn't  do anywhere else in the house)!

We started by stripping the walls which had textured white wallpaper on and as it seems, this was once possibly a girls bedroom!






Once the room was stripped (carpets and all removed) my OH started work on the flooring. He plans on replacing all the floor boards in the house as they're so creaky and the heating pipes have moved with the age of the house so its's extremely noisy especially upstairs!

He had to secure all the pipes down underneath the floorboards and then shave some wood off the joists to get the flooring completely level. I can now say though that it's creak free and level!

Once the floor boards had all been replaced, we chose to lay laminate. We opted for B&Q Geelong Grey Oak laminate flooring. It was incredibly easy to lay and we love the look of it!

Here's how it looks

We made sure we laid the laminate first and then added new skirting boards so that we didn't have to use the laminate trim, that's just our preference!

For the walls, we decided not to re-plaster the room as it's only a home office and the walls weren't too bad so we decided to use lining paper on the walls. The lining paper seemed a lot harder to work with than normal wallpaper especially when then painting over it! We did have a few bubbles appear but once the paint was dry they seamed to disappear.

For the paint, we used Dulux Chic Shadow on 3 walls and then created a beautiful feature wall using Dulux Sapphire Salute.

The Sapphire Salute was a bit daring for me as I'm not usually one for colour and I was concerned that it would make a small room look even smaller. It's safe to say though that I absolutely love it and it's left me wanting more of these dark colours around the house... we'll see!

Another thing my OH did to the room was install 7 LED spot lights. All of our doors upstairs have windows above them and we're slowly taking them out therefore we know it's going to make the landing darker therefore we're adding spot lights wherever we can to ensure extra light on the landing and LED spot lights seem to be working well!

Here is how the office looked once the walls were painted and the flooring had been laid (prior to glossing the skirting boards)

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We needed to purchase an office desk as we didn't have one so we headed to IKEA and created our own using 2 ALEX furniture storage drawers which were £50 each (here's the link http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/products/storage-furniture/drawer-units-storage-cabinets/alex-drawer-unit-white-art-10192824/) and a table top again from IKEA for £25.

The office desk was one of the most expensive things that we purchased for this room!

We're yet to purchase an office chair so we're currently using my dressing room chair (again from IKEA)!

 We added two white floating shelves onto our feature wall and my OH proudly presents his 'man cave' sign! This room is far from finished but the bulk of it has been done and we're both extremely happy with how it's turned out! It now means we have space to work/chill out at home away from it all. Oh yeah and our office also houses our resident snakes! That's the humongous tank you can begin to see on the left of these pictures... they're not the nicest things to photograph but nonetheless they're a part of the room.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing yet another of our room renovations!

Next on the list is the family bathroom which is being refitted March 2018!

Thank you for reading

Doll xoxo