My Space (not the defunct social site) Part II

It has turned into a space that everybody likes to stop by and chat with me. Hummingbird likes it because of all the cutesy things and colors. Yogli, for some reason, thinks it's funny and doesn't take it seriously but still stops by to chat. MonkeyMan, I think, likes it and is amazed that I actually did it.

My cloffice (combining a closet and an office) is officially open! 

Now, just a few months ago, I was not wearing a big smile like the one above whenever I walked into this closet. Well, actually, you couldn't really walk into this closet (yikes, look at all of that stuff!):

That was the closet in MonkeyMan's ManCave. The closet became a spot to dump things that we don't use often. Things like MonkeyMan's Jacksonville Jaguars memorabilia, boxes of office supplies, books, my wedding dress (sad, I know, but I'm not one of those sentimental brides when it comes to preserving wedding gowns. I need to get it into somebody's consignment shop), Hummingbird's flower girl dress, crafting odds and ends, birthday party supplies, ok you get the point.

As I mentioned in Part I, everyone had a space in our house except for me. Until now.

Obviously, the first thing I did was clean out that closet, decided what I was keeping, what needed a new home. We are frequent givers to the goodwill, so that's where a few things went. Next, I decided to  buy a table desk instead of affixing a board to the closet walls. Many of the pics I viewed on google showed images of melamine boards attached to the closet walls. MonkeyMan mentioned that we needed to keep each room of the house in good shape because we are moving in 3 years. So, inserting a table desk meant no hammering into the closet wall.

I made a list of everything that I needed from Ikea:

Not sure if Ikea is in your area but you probably could find pieces like these at Target or places similar. Once I had my items, it was time to get it started:

 

Since we wanted to keep the room in tact, I didn't remove the shelving. The shelving would hold the filing boxes, magazine files and craft totes.


















I wanted to feel inspired whenever sitting in my cloffice, so I made sure to have colorful and positive art in my area:

I consider myself a very smart and thrifty shopper. I buy most things when the price has been reduced. This translates into me having cutesy lil knick knack types of things. I took old spaghetti jars, filled them with black and clear stones to have as bookends. Did you know that when the label is taken off of Classico spaghetti jars, there are really mason jars under there! Hummingbird and I made the cutesy mini corkboards. The chair was a cinch to put together. For extra storage, I placed our wireless printer underneath my desk table. A few months back, I found this white mirror at the goodwill for $6. I placed the mirror strategically in a spot so that the light from MonkeyMan's ManCave would hit it and give me extra light in my cloffice. There is an electrical outlet right outside my cloffice, so I have a power strip in order to connect my laptop and printer.

I say all of this to say, use what you have. If you have to buy anything, go to the thrift stores/goodwill. If you go to regular stores, avoid paying full price. I paid full price for one of my cutesy art pieces at Hobby Lobby, went back a couple of weeks later, they were all marked down by 66%.

Now, if you are interested in creating your own cloffice, consider this:

Won't work if you are claustrophobic, most closets in normal sized houses are small. I've seen some google pics of closet transformations that are teeny tiny but sooooo cute! My space worked perfectly because it's a space that you can actually walk into, not like a coat closet. Again, that works for me.

Take a look at what others did with the space they had? Awesome, right?

                      

Google images

Google images

So, welcome to my cloffice. 

Looking forward to some great blog posts coming outta here!