Home Office / Guest Room – One Room Challenge Week 1

Welcome to week one of Spring 2020 One Room Challenge! Today, I’m sharing our plans for our home office / guest room that we’ll be transforming over for the next eight weeks. For those who don’t know, One Room Challenge is a bi-annual challenge for featured designers and guests (that’s me!) to transform a room in 6 weeks. Due to the pandemic, it was extended to 8 weeks to give us a better shot at actually finishing our rooms.

This is my first time participating in the One Room Challenge. For me, the hardest part is deciding which one room to makeover! I tend to hop from project to project rather than finishing a full room. Naturally, I’ve changed my mind about 85 times now on which room to do. However, we just spent the past week planning and painting our home office/simulator/guest room. After painting every wall, piece of trim, and doors in that room, I honestly have no desire to paint anything for the next month (anyone hear me on that one?). I’m also quite excited about our plans for this room, so I’m finally choosing our home office/guest room for this challenge!

Let me introduce you to Our Office Guest Room (YIKES!)

BEFORE:

You may want to shield your eyes…

Since the day we moved in, this room functioned as a storage room. It’s home to all the random things we don’t know what to do with. We put our thrifted desk in one corner and my husband’s racing simulator in another, so we called it an office. We also have two random bookshelves that don’t match and purely serve as more space for junk. This room has no design and zero organization. I’d literally cringe every time I walked into this room with its ugly yellow paint, matching yellow trim, and white overspray from the ceiling. I honestly don’t know how I made it a year before finally getting around to painting it. Then again, I think I just avoided the room as much as possible.

Our goal is to use this space as a multi-functional room. The primary use being for my husband’s racing simulator, and co-functioning as an office and guest room. Yes, I realize that’s a big ask! The racing simulator alone takes up about 6ft x 6ft of space. In a 14 ft square room, that’s a lot of real estate!

Design Plan for Our Home Office / Guest Room

Since this room is primarily used by my husband for his racing simulator, I wanted to design this room around that and make it special for him. For those who don’t know, he’s a professional race car driver, so this is used as more than just a game. That said, creating a room around this massive simulator presents a huge challenge (but for me, that’s part of the fun!). His racing sim is comprised of three TV screens, a computer, racing seat, steering wheel, and pedal system. It’s optimal for the room to be as dark as possible to reduce glare and allow him to see the screens clearly. Considering that, we thought it’d be best to paint the corner for the sim black and add blackout curtains to make it truly DARK.

 

The rest of the design will build around that. I’ll pull in light colors to bring some light back into the room and natural elements to fit our style. My goal is to make it comfortable for guests and functional for both my husband’s simulator and our home office. We are planning to use a daybed for guests and a closet office so we can maximize our space, but also hide it away when guests are over.

Challenges of Designing a Multi-functional Room

My biggest challenge in planning this room was figuring out how to arrange everything. After struggling with the room for months, I knew I needed to think outside the box to make it work. So, I sought a fresh perspective from Ashley Iszak on Instagram. She suggested using a room divider to section off the sim area. This got my creative juices flowing again. By sectioning off the sim, I could design the remaining space as it’s own room. I finally came up with a configuration that fit my husband’s racing simulator, while providing a workspace and guest sleeping area.

For those wondering, I used the Room Styler 3D Home Planner to make these mock-ups. This was my first time using anything like this and I found it super easy (it’s also free!).

Dark and Moody Home Office / Guest Room Plan of Attack:

Week 1: Intro to our room and design plan

Week 2: Paint walls and trim, hang curtains

Week 3: Build a DIY twin-to-king convertible daybed

Week 4: 14ft DIY floating shelf, paint closet, refinish doors

Week 5: Build closet office and add lighting

Week 6: Replace light fixture, build DIY room divider

Week 7: Hang gallery wall, add decor and finishing touches

Week 8: Final Reveal!

Our Budget

With all of the uncertainty from this pandemic, I felt it best to keep our budget small. My goal budget for our home office/guest room is $1,000, including all furnishings and decor. Good thing I like challenging goals! In order to keep our budget down, we’re planning to basically DIY everything. So, stay tuned for tons of tutorials in the coming weeks!

You can find more of my design inspo on my Office Mood Board on Pinterest and follow along on Instagram to see more behind the scenes as well as help make some important design decisions!

Be sure to check out other room transformations on the One Room Challenge blog as well.