An Office

I need an office at home. Not an office space – I have that now. I need an office. With a door. I need to be able to close the door. I have a lot of things I want to achieve this year, because I feel like my life hasn’t progressed in recent years and I’m sick of that feeling. Parts of those goals will require a door that shuts so that I can concentrate, take phone calls (I hate having people around me when I’m on the phone), and just have a space that I can make mine and dedicate it to my goals.

The problem with this is that we live in a two bedroom house.

One room is Ben’s office, and the other is our bedroom. Ben’s work also requires that he uses a small desk in our bedroom, in addition to his study. It’s a complicated story – but it’s not practical to move his office out of the room it’s currently in.

We also have a small nook (dining room) which is my current office area. It has no door and is by the kitchen. The freezer is also in my office. Then there is the lounge room. That’s it. I can’t work out what to do – and I’d love advice from anyone who’s good at this stuff!

 

Option 1: Lounge becomes Bedroom

We’ve considered putting the bed into the lounge room – we rarely have guests (and they’re usually just family!) so it doesn’t really matter if we don’t have an area to sit with people. This is also known as “we have no social life”. Anyhoo… We also drag the mattress into the lounge a lot to flop on and watch DVDs, or to be under the air con. This way it would be extra comfy as we’d have the bed base in there too.

Pros: I would get the bedroom as my office. Ben rarely needs to use his desk in there at the same time as I would be working in there, so for the most part, it should work as a private space.

Cons: We both have very different sleep schedules. I go to bed a lot earlier than Ben and as it is I wake up a lot when I hear him around the house. So when I go to bed, he would have to leave the room. There’s also no way of shutting the lounge off from other sound or light in the house. The wardrobes (we don’t have built-ins) would probably have to stay in the bedroom.

 

Option 2: Nook becomes bedroom

We could just move the bed into my current office space. It is big enough for our bed, but not the wardrobes.

Pros: I would get the bedroom as my office.

Cons: While the nook is a little more closed off than the lounge, it still doesn’t have a door. We could rig up sheets to be ‘doors’ but it would look pretty ugly and probably not help much for blocking out light and sound. I don’t want to sleep in the same room as a freezer.

 

Option 3: Get a 3 bedroom house

Two people who both have goals of working from home, trying to squish into a small & old two bedroom house – the problem may very well be that we need more space!!

Pros: SPACE! Heck, we could get something with actual storage space…

Cons: We just signed another year on our lease. We have cheap rent, a great location & air con – all things that are very hard to find. We have a dog – it’s very hard to find a house that lets you have a dog on the lease. A three bedroom house would cost more – I have no desire to pay more money as a renter – it is dead money after all!

 

Help! How do you make space in a very small house!? I need my own office space! Door included. Am I missing an obvious solution?