Converting a closet into an office space

Lisa had the great idea of converting the linen closet at the top of the stairs into an office space. This would be necessary, for the kids would eventually require their own room. We’ve also both been working from home during Covid, so it made sense to tackle the project now.

It started back in February actually, when we were taking down the drywall at the stairwell to make room for the new stairwell rails that we would be installing. During this time, I took off the closet doors (and sold them), and took out all of the shelves, and all of the shelving brackets as well.

There was a bunch of drywall patching that had to be done, along with painting. I also installed an electrical outlet in the closet, for we would obviously need power that would be provided to the ‘office’ closet.

In addition, prior to this work, there was a power cord that was dangling from the attic opening from the ceiling, down to the floor, which provides power to the house fan in the attic. I ended up running the wiring inside the wall instead, and created an access outlet, near the power outlet, thus creating a much cleaner looking finish.

Here’s the power outlet that I added, of which I got the power from the exisitng outlet which was outside of the closet as you can see, to the right of the new outlet.

So this is what the patching of the removed shelving units looked like.

And ultimately, the painted, patched, and finished closet (but yet to be office).

So you can now see that the dangling power cord is gone but all of my equipment is still laying on the floor (old flooring I might add). So like I mentioned, this was all done back in maybe late Feb, early March. It was essentialy like an shallow empty cavern now.

After I finished the flooring, I was able to begin working on the actual office.

The plan was to install a floating desk shelf, along with shelving units above it for filing storage, and a printer. I also wanted to minimize cluttered cabling, by trying to hide it in the walls and creating access for cabling to go in between each shelf. Also in my plan, was to install a couple of pot lights in the office which would also be dimmable.

There is a lot of network cabling that comes back to this office space, because all of the security camera wiring comes back to this point. In addition, my outdoor speakers in the backyard and its associated wiring also come back to this office space. So hiding all of this in behind the wall end up looking way better.

Under the floating desk, we would also put in a file cabinet (Alex file cabinet from Ikea), which would provide us with some additional storage space.

So for the actual desk, we ended up purchasing a wooden kitchen countertop from Ikea. I cut it to size and installed it on the shelving supports that I installed. It ends up complementing our new flooring quite nicely.

I then worked on the additional shelves, and cut it to the correct depth of which could house our printer, as well as our filing boxes.

Up above, you’ll also notice the pot lights that I installed, which really was a nice touch, and gave the space much more lighting to make it more of a functional office space.

You can see that in the attached video:

So here’s what it ended up looking like. A functional and cozy looking office space. Yay!