Second Bedroom Redo | Part 1

Right now, Stephen and I live in a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom apartment so our storage is very limited and therefore we have to get creative. We currently use our second bedroom as an office, garage and storage room. It's a mess, but it works. I've been seeing a lot of office inspiration on Pinterest and decided to get our 2nd room in better order. I didn't want to spend too much money since this is a temporary living situation and there's nothing we can do with the stuff in the room.

Some of the bigger challenges of the room:
Two desks - Originally, we had 2 desks - one from my bedroom suite which has a filing cabinet and one that was passed down to Stephen that has a lot of surface area but no storage. The passed down desk was great when I was still in school, because I had tons of space to spread out and work but we don't need that space now.

Storage space - There are a lot of items that we need to keep but have no storage - i.e. Christmas/holiday decorations, Stephen's office items (cords, computer components, etc.), a safe, wrapping paper, gift boxes and my china sets.

Garage items - since we don't have a garage, we have no place to store Stephen's golf clubs, the artificial Christmas tree we purchased on major sale last year and Stephen's old DJ equipment from college that he needs to sell.

Here are some before pictures...



There is no longer a need for 2 desks and you can't even use the desk on the right due to the safe being underneath it.

This area right next to the door is where we kept all of the "Garage items". It got out of control once we added the Christmas tree.

I cannot wait to get a china cabinet once we get a house to display my beautiful china! At least the boxes are cute to look at ;)

I am very pleased with how the room turned out. There's pretty much the same amount of items but I feel like it's less crowded. 

Some of the ways we fixed the challenges:
Two desks - we took apart the desk that was passed down, separated it and used it more as a table than a desk. We made the desk that I had the primary desk again. We put the printer on one table and left the other one pretty empty. We really needed the underneath as storage and both tables fit everything quite comfortably.

Storage space - as I said above, we really utilized the taken apart desk for storage underneath it. I'm currently in the process of sewing fabric to attach to the outside of the tables so they're covered and you cannot see the items under it (I'll do another post once that's complete).

Garage items - Unfortunately we still need to keep these items but we relocated them to the corner of the room since we rarely use them. They're still an eyesore, but they fit perfectly in the corner and really open the room up since they're not sitting right in front of the door.

This is my little area of the room where I do most of my blogging so I added flowers. I made the two pillows for our wedding and we weren't using them anywhere so I thought they added to the room and made the chairs more comfortable. In the future, I really want to make a cute bulletin board to hang above my desk (like this one).

I'm definitely enjoying the room a lot more than I used to and can't wait to finish it up! It's also going to be super nice when we have a house and I can actually have an office. Check back for part 2 & part 3!

Linking up with Annie.