Reveal: Sewing Room & Home Office Update

Back in summer I shared my sewing room and home office moodboard with you, and now it’s finally time to reveal the finished thing!

When we moved into the house, the sewing room had been a children’s bedroom before so it was covered in wall stickers that were cute but didn’t really suit our currently child-free life. I’d had this room set aside as my office and sewing room from as soon as we looked round the first time as it was light, bright and airy, big enough for plenty of storage and floor space for cutting. Our first update on the room wasn’t particularly inspired – I set up a cheap desk, chairs leftover from the dining table and a set of box shelves as storage. Not the prettiest, but definitely functional.

Finally my home office got its chance to shine this summer, and with a little bit of help from Bairstow Eves, I got the chance to make it better than ever! They challenged me to style up my home office to sell, with one key feature piece to centre the room around. The Styled to Sell campaign is now live on their site, so head over there to check out my top tips for styling up a multi-functional home office to sell, then come back here to see more about the room itself.

As part of the campaign, I was asked to create a short video with my tips, so I hope you enjoy the above!

Colour scheme

The first and most obvious change to the room was the colour of the wall. We’d picked out a very brave colour scheme for me, with a strong navy on the wall highlighted with mustard yellow in the accessories and forest green in some faux and real plants. This is a multi-functional space for me – it’s partly home office for working at home and blogging, partly sewing room, occasionally yoga room, so this colour scheme worked perfectly for all of them.

The bold shade on the wall is sophisticated and grown up, ideal for keeping me focused when working, and I like to have a bit of creativity and flair in the accessories, so the bright yellow shades on the Amara desk lamp and Maeve, my dressform, work for that. The green of the plants keeps it fresh and alive, both to keep me inspired and energetic. Finally I threw in splashes of metallic copper with these hexagon mirrors, also from Amara and a copper plant pot.

Centrepiece

The focal piece I chose for the room, aside from the feature wall, is the desk. What’s more important in a home office than the right desk? This one is from IKEA, and is technically two separate pieces: Finnvard (the legs) and Linnmon (the work surface). These can be bought as a package or separately.

I’d initially looked at desks that came as one single item, but found Finnvard/Linnmon to be much more flexible which fits in with my multi-functional needs. If I need to add a larger work surface in future, I can buy another set of legs and another top to extend it. A huge bonus of this desk is that it can actually be raised and lowered to act as a standing or seated desk. I’m used to having a standing desk at work so I like the option to have it at home too. It can be sloped too if you need that for your work which is always handy.

There was a choice of materials for the desk and I went for the black-brown work surface with beech legs. I did consider spray painting the legs gold and may still do so in future for that ultimate blogger office look, but the dark top seemed to fit best with the colour scheme I’d chosen rather than white which I would have normally gone for.

 

Details

Probably the most important part – this is how you make a house into a home. I already had my box shelves as storage, so in the process of updating the room, we entirely emptied these and cleared them out a little to make it tidier. On the top of these I keep a vintage-style suitcase to store sewing patterns, a decorative dress form, a SONOS Play 3 speaker (important when you’re working at home or sewing to keep me motivated!), old photo albums, a reed diffuser and, at the time the photo was taken, a ball of wool that I’m still learning to knit from!

The other key detail area is my Disney shelf! My sewing room is my room in the house. You know when you’re younger and your bedroom is your own room? Turns out when you have to share a bedroom with a boy, you can’t have as much Disney stuff in it as you’d like, so that’s spilled into my sewing room. I’m keeping this shelf as my inspiration and imagination area – Disney inspires creativity in me, so it’s ideal for my multi-functional home office.

I’ve also got this amazing decoupage stag head my sister made me on the wall and we added a new pair of curtains from IKEA. I wasn’t sure about how to go about this window area since I want to keep as much light in the room as possible, but it looked very bare previously. We almost chose a blind for it, then decided curtains would soften the look. I initially was set on grey (because I love anything and everything grey) but they weren’t available in the right size. In the end, the navy matched our wall colour perfectly so we took the risk, and I’m glad we did! We went for floor length too and I think this makes a huge difference to the room.

So what do you think of how I’ve styled my home office? Would you do anything different?

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