Apartment-Friendly Room Updates & A Drawing

As I mentioned last week, browsing the endless inspiring images on Pinterest inspired me to cook some new foods and also to update our office/guest room.

Here's one office space that I fell for on Pinterest...

not to mention we have the same bookcase, and this gave me
the motivation I needed to turn it on its side.

Source: livecreatingyourself.com via Ashley on Pinterest

Last summer you may have read about how I decorated our second bedroom/office in our apartment. Generic vanilla walls and bad carpet, which are fairly typical of apartment living, do not always make for very inspiring spaces. Even after giving quite a bit of though to that room, it still didn't seem right. It wasn't as functional or inspiring as I was hoping it would be.

{you can see some office before and after photos here }

We really need this very room in our apartment to do doubly duty, because it needs to serve as both an office/workspace and a guest room. There is no permanent bed in the room, only air mattresses used on demand (which isn't very often). Our rather small space needed some furniture re-arranging and some cosmetic updates to make it more functional as an office and as a bedroom, so that's exactly what we did last week.

{ Who says my architecture degree isn't being used?!
I did some good old fashioned hand drawing for this here blog post!
Yes... I even drew everything to scale. }

Notice the light blue rectangles in the drawing above: after moving our furniture
we gained some very valuable floor space for our guests' air mattress beds.


1: Our desk and chair stayed in the same place, but now our Ikea bookshelf is to the left.
We can still look out the only window to the right of the desk.
2: We turned our Ikea Expedit bookshelf horizontal. Our printer is no longer on the floor (:
Having the shelving horizontal allowed us to use the top for storage.
3: We put the bookshelf in the entrance to the room, that really helped open up the floor.
Plus it looks pretty from the hallway now.
4: There ended up being plenty of room for my craft folding table and chair.
I already covered the entire table in paper, scissors, and architecture supplies. Woohoo!

Who knew that moving some furniture and adding a 5 foot x 2.5 foot folding table would make the room seem incredibly bigger?! Note that we added a folding table (not a stationary table), because it can be cleared off and stored in our closet when we need to make room for air mattresses.

Now that's what I call function.
You have to get a little creative and make good use of space
when you live in smaller spaces like apartments.


{ Did you read this blog post about how I
made the most of our postage stamp sized pantry? }

Have you done any DIY projects
that made the most of small spaces?