This professional organizer needed a home office makeover, so I finally carved out some time to work on it this month. Both organizing and beautifying were in order! I started gathering ideas months ago, pulling photos from magazines and pinning them to my “inspiration board.” I settled on the Expedit shelving system from Ikea, which would be filled with handy baskets and boxes to stash my office supplies.
Ikea also had a cute desk called the Leksvik, which I love because it has a handy top drawer for daily office essentials. While my hubby had the hardest job — putting together all that furniture — I also put in many hours of sorting through and weeding out years of office supplies, books, cords, electronics, and stuff I just didn’t need anymore. (All my cast-offs went to Goodwill.)
The fun part was deciding where and how to store all my keepers. These beautiful Knipsa baskets from Ikea hold my supplies perfectly (and they smell lovely, like fresh grass). And the inexpensive black document boxes hold less-frequently-needed items like paper and envelopes on the bottom shelf. Eight magazine file boxes hold my back issues of Real Simple and HGTV Magazine, plus copies of my two books, Born to Organize and Learn to Organize. The tough part was losing the two file drawers in my old desk. I culled them down dramatically and now the important papers live in four cute file boxes (from Target), labeled by broad category with stick-on chalkboard labels (from World Market). All in all, the project went smoothly and more quickly than I expected. I still want a comfy loveseat and side table to finish off the room, but that will have to wait a bit.
So here is the before and after of the shelving:
