Home office and spare bedroom ideas + future plans

It’s surprising how easy it is to fill rooms in your house. Our new-build Persimmon home is twice the size of our old house. It’s…

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It’s surprising how easy it is to fill rooms in your house. Our new-build Persimmon home is twice the size of our old house. It’s got three bedrooms, which gives us much more space compared to our two-bed demi detached house. After a few weeks of living there, we filled both spare bedrooms. Thanks to a spare bed, wardrobe, set of shelves a studio desk and an 88-key piano, both rooms were full very quickly! So I thought I’d write about home office and spare bedroom ideas.

When Leo came along, we turned one room into a Safari themed nursery for him.

We planned Leo about. a month before covid took off. It wasn’t long before we were both working from home. A blessing for me because my first trimester was horrific! As I have a work laptop, I worked from the sofa, or from bed on a bad day. I had my camera off and was on mute for a long time as I was a complete mess.

My partner bought a desktop computer so he could work from home and we transformed one of the rooms into an office. This was last April before we had done the nursery.

Things started to get better during the summer with Coronavirus. We decorated both rooms and basically had to squeeze two rooms into one. Little did we know that my partner would be working from home yet again after New Year, as we were into a third lockdown. So the spare room became an office, once again.

So here’s a post with some home office and spare bedroom ideas, sharing how we have made the most of that space! This room is still very much a work in progress so I’m going to talk about some things we plan to do in the future.

Home office and spare bedroom ideas pin

Home office and spare bedroom ideas

We pack a lot into one room, we started by painting it a dusky pink colour similar to this and then spent a lot of time pondering what would fit where!

So let’s take a look at what our spare room functions as.

ikea day bed spare room

A guest bedroom.

As we have family that lives far away, a guest bedroom was a priority for us. We had a sofa bed in the old house and I hated it. Well, it was bright orange for one. Also, it was in the living room.

Our small house had the stairs in the living room, so there were times my partner had family staying over when I was working the next day and I would have to go downstairs to get a coffee and then to leave the house when they were sleeping.

Trying my best to not make a noise and not to trip over anything, as I creeped bast them sleeping on the bed. It was something I’m glad to leave behind!

Now we have a day bed from Ikea. The day bed is actually quite big, but it pulls out into a double and then tucks into a single when not in use. We keep cushions and throws from B&M on it so it looks like a sofa!

I’d love a dedicated guestroom where there’s a made-up double bed all the time! It’s a pain to have to set the bed up and then put it all away when we have guests. But we don’t have that option with the space we have. If we did, I’d love to design my own bed from Arista Living. You can use the discount code WIN50 for 50% off (expires 2022-03-01 10:53:00). Bargain!

In the future I’d love to get some print up in this area – I think some black and white prints like these from Etsy or this bigger one would look great!

A guitar studio.

This is my partner’s area of the room! His guitars are on a stand next to the desk, he’s just bought a new customised speaker (it looks pretty amazing!) and he does have a studio desk. But the desk needs to go. It’s really big and the colour is a bit ugly! This is the one he has. We got it because when I first started piano lessons, I had a cheaper stage piano that sat on the pull-out part!

We’re looking at a desk similar to this one. It’s much smaller and there’s a bit of storage for some of his guitar things! His speaker can go under the desk and he has a Black Sabbath framed record that I think he should put up there, otherwise, I’m going to take over!

home office and spare bedroom ideas - pianoA piano room.

I love my piano!

I started taking piano lessons in August 2019. I played electric keyboard for 10 years as a child/teenager so I already had some knowledge of music. I could already read notes and play treble clef, so I managed to get to grade 5 piano in a year. Learning to play the piano is one of the best things I’ve ever done! I love it SO much, It’s never too late to learn an instrument!

Anyway, the piano was in the room which we turned into the nursery, so we had to make it fit in the spare room too. The piano is next to the door, which is the smallest wall. It’s a lovely little corner and my future plans are to put a shelf above (I have my eye on this one!) and maybe some prints. I do have these two breastfeeding prints from Etsy which I may put there, but it depends on how it looks with the shelf.

An office.

A large room with a massive oak desk in the centre, a swivel chair, office phone booths, printers and a coffee machine. These are all the things I used to think of when I imagined a home office! I spent so many years dreaming up my own office or blog space. I actually was lucky enough to have a spare room for blogging when I lived in my own flat

But you don’t need any of those things! Nobody has a printer these days, and as we both have laptops now, we don’t need to be stuck at a desk! (My partner has replaced his Windows desktop now after it had lots of issues with this guitar software). The guitar studio area will also double as an office,.

But we can also sit on the day bed on our laptop, too.

In short, it’s just a room to have a bit of quiet so we can concentrate when we need to. Hopefully, this is the end of lockdowns now, so my partner won’t have to go back to turning it into a proper office (with his blue swivel chair and paperwork everywhere!).

I’m so excited to get this room finished as I think it will look lovely once we get rid of the desk and add a few pieces on the wall!

Read this post: 28 smart bedroom storage ideas

20 comments

  1. We’re just about to move and we’re definitely going to get a day bed for the spare bedroom, which will be doubling up as an office – it makes so much sense seeing as it’ll be an office more than a bedroom, but we still want somewhere for people to stay!
    Amy xx
    callmeamy.co.uk

  2. Love all of these ideas! I really wanted to learn to play piano when I was younger, so maybe it’s the right time to start! I would really love to just fit a desk in my room to work from and it would already be dreamy. Home office sounds great x

  3. Love this! There’s so many things you can do with a spare room. My boyfriend would love a guitar or music studio or a museum for all his racing car models. I’d love an office and a Yoga studio. But we’d need a very big house for all of that haha!

  4. Our second bedroom is an office, as we both work from home and we both need a good desk for this. Although we worked from the living room, the conservatory, and even outside when the weather is nice. My husband had a couple of meetings from outside, with his colleagues, and they were saying it was so cool to work from outside. Having to think carefully what’s the best solution for a room made it so much better for us, as the office is perfect.
    Also, you might want to consider an inflatable bed, if you have more people over and not enough beds. We have one, from when we were camping, and it is really good and comfy, better than I imagined initially.

  5. it looks like a lovely room and it’s good you could turn it into an office for working from home! When we built our house we needed a home office as I worked from home one day a week. And with hubby in IT and liking games, it was one of the first rooms in our new house that we finished, haha! Came in handy when they announced working from home, as I had all the things I needed set up. A lot of my colleagues struggled to get equipment when everyone started buying home office stuff!

    Hope you are having a good weekend 🙂

  6. Lovely ideas! We don’t have spare rooms in our house right now but when we do I’d love for it to be a spare bedroom + a chill room because sometimes I just need space and to be alone haha.

  7. Some great tips here. We just turned one of the kids rooms into a safari theme as well..

  8. Great ideas for a spare room. I would love to turn ours into a craft room, but my craft stuff probably wouldn’t all fit in there haha! Love the sound of the Safari room!

    Thanks for sharing 🙂
    Aismy xoxo
    Aimsy’s Antics

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