How Our Dual IKEA Home Office Saved Us

When we first purchased our 70s house, we were excited to finally have a dedicated home office. Our previous home did not have one and it always felt like administrative items were spilling into our kitchen and other areas of the house. It took us several years before we transformed our fourth bedroom into our IKEA dual home office, but I am so glad we did! It has one hundred percent saved our sanity during quarantine! I am sure many of you are now considering home office options too, so I wanted to share ours as it is, 5 years later.
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We added our IKEA dual home office in 2015 but up until then it was a very over looked space and we often kept the door closed. This is what it used to look like.

So how did this save us during quarantine?

We have a home office

This seems obvious, but as a REALTOR I work with clients all the time who do not have a dedicated space for a home office because they do not work from home. As we have all learned, that can change pretty fast and even your kids might need a place for in home school. We were very lucky that we already had a home office set up and didn’t have to scramble to figure things out.

Our space is set up as a dual home office

When I first started designing this room, we had no intention of it being a dual home office, but randomly realized it could be. At that time, neither of us actually worked from home, but we liked the idea of being able to share our small 100 square foot room. Little did we know, I would eventually work from home all the time and Barry would need to during quarantine. I don’t know what we would have done without our dual home office. We would have been fighting over the office or one of us would be set up in the dining room.

Our house hasn’t been turned upside down

I can’t tell you how many friends I have seen on Facebook set up at their dining room table or on a folding card table because they do not have a home office. Different strokes for different folks, but for me my environment really drives my mood. If the house is a mess I feel stressed. If all my work is sprawled out everywhere, I feel disorganized and scatter brained. Having a place for everything I need to function for work is very important.

We need monitors and keyboards

Call us old school if you like, but neither Barry or I like to work on our laptops. Maybe we are just used to that corporate environment or our eyes are getting old, haha, but working for days on end with a small screen and no full size keyboard sounds like torture! Luckily, we both have monitors and keyboards at home that dock with our laptops and we can both use two screens.

Low distraction zone

I don’t know about you guys, but the struggle with distractions is real! Lets be honest. Our home office is actually somewhat separated from the rest of the house which helps a lot. All of the bedrooms are on our upper level except this one. It is at the end of the hallway by the garage so we are not distracted by snacks in the kitchen or the TV in the family room. We actually used to have a TV in here but we never turned it on because it was too much of a distraction, so we took it out last year. Having a low distraction zone has been really helpful in making it feel like an actual work day and allows us to get more accomplished.

Did we plan to ever share this office for two plus months? Nope. But we are so glad it was an option! Instead of scrambling to figure out how to work from home, we just walked downstairs everyday and turned on our computers. Now we may have worked many of these days in our pjs, but nonetheless, we went to work 😉

Shop Our Office

Chairs | Pillow Covers (similar) | Lisa’s Monitor | Barry’s Monitor | Keyboard | Mouse | Rug (similar) | Lamps (similar) | Drawer Cabinet | Shelves | Filing Drawer | Countertop | Potted Grass | Succulent Planter | Agate Book End | Flooring

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