Home Office Style: How to Create Your Dream Workspace
Living Pretty Ep15 | Home Office Style: How to Create Your Dream Workspace
Home office style and comfort has suddenly become more important than ever with Covid 19 rearing its ugly head. The world is a scary place right now, and while we’re stuck at home, all we can do is try our best to create a comforting environment for ourselves amidst the craziness.
If you’re fortunate enough to have a job that allows you to work from home during this time (if you are not, my heart sincerely goes out to you), we have an opportunity to focus some time and energy on how to make a home office more inspiring. Your work from home office setup can have a huge impact on your mindset and productivity, and decorating a home office can be a challenge - especially in a small apartment.
If you’re looking for small office space ideas and working from home inspiration, and you want to improve work space decor, watch this video or read the written version below to get some ideas on how to create your dream workspace!
Watch the video now!
↓ Wanna read the episode? ↓
I’ve made some slight edits in the transcript below so that everything makes more sense in text form. But overall, this is almost a word-for-word dictation of what I say in the episode. I’m a much better writer than this, I swear, haha.
We are living through a bizarre, unprecedented, and scary time right now with Covid 19. And if you're reading this post in the future, hello! This will be valuable to you too, reader from the future, especially if this Coronavirus thing changes the way we work as a society and gets companies to realize that working from home can be a viable and valuable new norm.
Working from home may become more common after this kick in the ass from Covid 19.
Regardless of what this means for our future, what I want to talk about is how to make your work-from-home environment into a cozy sanctuary, so that in the face of all this uncertainty and fear, you can carve out a little piece of comfort for yourself while you're stuck at home.
So in this video, I took you on a tour of my home office and I showed you all the little details that make it inspiring and aesthetically pleasing to me. Now I'm gonna go more in-depth into the actual steps that you can take to make your workspace work for you.
Let's talk about little style details and the actions you can take to make your home office into an oasis that makes working from home feel homey as well as productive.
Tell me in the comments below, are you working from home right now? Is it challenging? Is it a breath of fresh air? How are you navigating this work from home situation, and are you doing anything to make your home office into a better environment for yourself? Tell me below!
1. Dominate your junk drawers.
So the first step that you can take to make your home office into a cozy and productive space is something I'm about to do for myself right now, and it's going to be some work, but I'm gonna take you on this journey with me…
I am going to go through my junk drawer.
I... am... going... to... go... through... my... junk drawer.
If you've watched my home office tour video, you know that my greatest shame in my apartment is this junk drawer. And since I have been working from home, it's been driving me extra crazy knowing that all this shit is down there taunting me. Waiting…
So I'm gonna go through it and I'm gonna show you from my own experience the impact that it has on my sanity. So, clearly my sanity needs some improvement... and the solution is in this junk drawer.
So here's the junk drawer as it is right now, and now I'm going to finally - after three years of living here and never organizing this little beast - I'm gonna do it.
That felt good. Man, you know, go through your junk drawers. Seriously, if you have a junk drawer and it's in the vicinity of your workspace, or part of your workspace, go through that junk drawer. It will make a huge, huge difference to your sanity.
That's probably the most valuable piece of advice that I could give to you here: go through your junk drawer.
2. Get organized.
The next thing I would do is optimize the space to make it more conducive - wow, I'm using really big words for no reason - optimize the space to make it more conducive to being organized. Damn.
Basically, what I'm saying is find something that will allow you to better manage your random little items that you keep on your desk.
So recently, I switched from an iMac to a Macbook Pro, and that prompted me to get this little guy. It's just a little shelving thing that I ordered off of Amazon.
And it's totally changed my desk. Now I have a place to put my headphones and some random papers and stuff like that, and it's made a huge difference.
Also, it was really easy to put together! My boyfriend helped me, but I could have done it myself... So you can definitely do it too.
Basically, the reason why this has made such a huge difference is before, my work space was just pretty. And I actually talked about it in this Instagram post I made a while ago about how my office may look good but she doesn't have a lot going on up here between the ears.
And what I meant by that is I pretty much just made a pretty place for myself, but it was really hard for this place to feel productive and organized. And just the simple act of getting a small little shelving thing to store away the little odds and ends that gather around my desk... it's made a huge difference.
It’s better for your sanity to have a clutter free space, and especially since we're working from home now, we need to like, up our game I think. Or else we'll lose our minds.
Storage, storage, storage! If you want my take on the best storage stuff, you can watch this video, in which I walk you through all of my favorite storage solutions that I've been using since living in tiny apartments in New York.
That's really a key thing here - storage - so that you can stay clutter-free and make it so that all of your mental space is going towards your work and your comfort, rather than on the clutter.
3. Be extra.
Another tip I have for making your home office feel cozy and inspiring is don't be afraid to be really extra about it when it comes to your decor.
In my home office tour video, I talked a lot about how drama and romance in this space really is what makes it feel warm and inviting. So don't get stuck in the mindset of “this is a workspace, so it needs to be serious, and it needs to be cold, and it needs to just be organized, and that's it”. No!
Take this opportunity - this work from home phase that we're all in - to really express yourself. Even if it means taking some decor from from other parts of your apartment and putting them in here. I mean, right now, since we're working from home, that means that a lot of our time is being spent in our in our little workspaces - whatever that means for us.
For some of you, it might even just mean working on your couch, and that is something that I have definitely been taking advantage of - working from my couch and cuddling with Helo.
But wherever you're working from, really go for the style that you love. Don't limit yourself. Go over-the-top. Really commit to a style.
And you'll find that it makes it more of a joy to sit down and work, you know? I feel excited to sit down at my desk every day because it looks like this.
And again, you don't have to spend extra money right now. Find some things - just a couple things, maybe - that are already in your apartment, and move them over to your workspace.
Because your workspace kind of needs it more right now don't you think? You're gonna be spending a lot of time in there for a bit.
4. Accept that styling makes a difference.
And the last step I have for making your home office into a more comfy and productive space is to accept the fact that styling makes a difference, and that it's not pointless.
You may think, “okay well, what's a candle on my desk actually gonna do?” or “what's some faux florals on my desk gonna do?” “what's a crystal gonna do?” And yes, maybe they won't magically make you better at your job or they won't magically improve your mood… but actually, they do kind of magically improve your mood!
Having these little aesthetically pleasing elements right on your desk does improve your mood, as long as you're open to it. I mean, if you're dead set on not accepting that these things can actually have a positive impact on your mindset, then they probably won't. But if you allow it, these are the things that will make your workspace feel like YOUR workspace.
We have an opportunity here to make a work environment for ourselves that actually feels good. I mean, imagine that. Shouldn't we feel good every day? Isn't there power in that?
So the way you create that feel-good feeling in your home office is through these little accents.
If I were to give you a quick shopping list off the top of my head of things that will make your home office feel more homey, it would be a candle - or a few in my case. It would be some faux florals (or real ones if you can handle the death. I can't, which is why all my florals are faux).
I would get some wall art that you feel an emotional connection to. Not just pretty wall art, but wall art that really, you know, lights you up inside.
I would get a cute mug as a pen holder. You don't even have to go buy a pen holder, just use one of your favorite mugs.
And if you keep a box of Kleenex on your desk, I would get a Kleenex box cover - a stylish one - so that the ugly Kleenex box isn't showing.
You know, these are just the little details that at all add up to create a stylish and comfy space.
And if you're not in a place to be buying things right now, a lot of this stuff you likely already have. Check your closet - do you have some candles in there that you forgot about? Do you have some really great pictures of you with your friends? That can be your wall art. You probably have a mug that you could use as a pen holder.
These are likely things that you already have, and it's just a matter of putting them together in your home office space to make it feel more like you, rather than a cold work space where you just do work.
So those are my tips for creating a workspace that's inspiring and comfy and cozy, and really a place that just lights you up inside every day.
Like I said, we're gonna be spending a lot of time in our workspaces, and why not make them beautiful? And why not make them appeal to our senses? Why not make them a place that we're excited to sit down and work in every day?
Things are really scary and unpredictable right now, but that doesn't change the fact that you deserve to live comfortably, live stylishly, and live in a way that benefits your mindset. In fact, it's more important now more than ever to find our little bits of comfort, our little bits of joy, wherever we can get them.
For daily posts from my studio apartment here in Seattle, follow me on Instagram @moda.misfit. And for more apartment styling tips, be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel and hit the bell to be notified when a new episode goes up every week.