Home Office

Work and Design: Sewing Room Decor Ideas

A lot of your workspace, equipment, and materials can be turned into decor features for your sewing room. For example a mood board can also act as a wall decor feature just by putting a great frame around it. Or how about putting up rows of clipboards to hang up your mood board pieces?

The great thing about a sewing workspace is that you’ll have a lot of colorful fabric around. This can be hidden away in draws or cupboards. Or they can be stored in a way that displays them in the room like in picture (1). How about using ladders to hang the fabric on, or using open furniture like cubby holes/closets, shelves, or vintage baskets (2) where you can store your fabric in the open. Have a look at our sewing room storage post here for more ideas.

Another idea is to have your thread out in the open too, just like in picture (3). Have a look at our sewing room designs post and check out the photo of the thread spools hanging up on the wall in a frame. It is one thing to have all of these colorful threads and fabrics out in the open, but if you color coordinate everything (group colors together) it will look even better.

If you have some great looking tools, these can be stored and displayed out in the open too – just like the scissors hanging and decorating the wall in picture (4). If you don’t have any, check out Etsy for some vintage sewing tools that you can use as decoration pieces – things like scissors, measuring tapes, an antique sewing machine, and vintage spools of thread (5).

Other sewing room decor ideas and accessories include having an elegant chandelier hanging down and lighting up the room (6). Or how about having a vintage mannequin/dress form standing by your sewing work area (7)? 1/2/3/4/5/6/7

April 14, 2013 in Decor, Home Office

“DIY: Work in Progress” Printable Door Hanger and Picture Display

Here is a little something to hang on the door of a craft room (check out our pin board of craft rooms) or home office – as a sort of ‘do not disturb’ sign. I’ve also created a version that can be printed out and put in a frame for daily inspiration 🙂

March 12, 2013 in DIY, Home Office, Made By HtA

Bedroom Office Ideas, Tips, and Designs

It’s not the best place in the house to have as an office space, because the work clutter can make the bedroom a bit of a stressful place (which can disrupt sleep). But here are a few quick tips and ideas for turning a bedroom into an office and making it a great working and sleeping area.

Top Bedroom Office Ideas and Design Tips

Fitting a Desk: You don’t really need to have much space in the bedroom to fit in a home office. A tiny, well organized desk up against the wall will do for most people as seen in picture (1). You can even combine the home office with existing bedroom furniture – like using a dresser that has a pull out or pull down tabletop (2). Or if you have more space in the bedroom, arrange the desk to face outwards so you’re not looking at a wall just like in pictures (3 – fitting a mirror makes the space feel larger) and (4).

Covering Up: Being able to close off the office space when it is not in use would be ideal. This can be done with curtains, screens, or placing book shelves in between the office space and the bed area.

Another idea is to fit the home office between closets (5), or inside a closet (6). This is a great space saver for smaller rooms. Have a look at our post for designs and ideas on fitting an office in a closet (aka a cloffice) anywhere in the house – Creating a Workspace At Home: Closet Office Ideas.

Storage: You’ll want to keep everything contained to one location as much as possible – so that you can also enjoy the room as a relaxing bedroom, and not just a work space. The wall above the desk can be made for great storage – by hanging wall shelves (7) or peg boards (8). A closet can be used to store work items, and the inside of the doors can have calendars, white boards, and pegboards fitted. In picture (9) a bench doubles as a filing cabinet, and hides all of the paper work when not in use.

Lighting: To make it a comfortable work space you’ll want to have a good amount of lighting. Setting up the desk by the window is a great idea as you’ll have tons of natural lighting during the day (10). Table lamps or having a track light fitted to the ceiling (one that can have the lights angled to different parts of the bedroom) work well during the night. 1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8/9/10

Here are some more home office posts to get ideas from:

March 6, 2013 in Bedroom, Home Office

DIY Chalkboard Globe: Anthropologie Soapstone Knock Off

So I’ve been using chalkboard paint for the first time. The first project I wanted to do was to recreate the look and feel of a soapstone globe I saw on Anthropologie that cost $368. It would be great to have something so solid and raw sitting on the desk, but for my cheaper alternative I decided to use a normal globe I found at a book shop.

Materials used: Plastic globe, black acrylic paint, chalkboard paint, brushes and chalk – not much really.

1. Step one was to paint the entire globe black including the blue stand. I wanted to have a basecoat to paint the chalkboard paint onto.

2. After painting 2 coats of black acrylic, and 2 coats of chalkboard paint – I then conditioned the globe. This is done by crushing up some chalk and wiping it all over. This is when I tried to create the soapstone texture, by wiping the chalk dust horizontally around the globe.