Turning a very small bedroom into a cozy office. When we toured our new home there was one room that most saw and said, “they’re calling this a bedroom”?! They indeed were and, as I heard from the prior owner, it was indeed used as such. For us however we knew it was too small to be a bedroom that met our needs, but it could become my dream cozy cottage inspired office.
A look below at where we started:
Lets first talk about all the things we needed to do to prep the space. Step one, remove the closet and bookcase seen above. We actually added a much larger bookcase into the room, but the placement of the old bookcase ate up so much of the most usable square footage. With sloped ceilings and dormer, we couldn’t afford to loose that much wall/floor space on the one wall that had standard height ceilings.
The closet was actually removed to accommodate raising the stairwell height *see example below. The raised stairwell height was much more important to the flow of the home than that the small closet!
Next we repaired the plaster walls and removed the old laminate to replace with true oak hardwoods flooring. Now that we have a clean slate the fun can begin.
Matthew added cedar planks to the sloped portion of the ceiling and I ultimately painted them and the walls Pale Oak by Benjamin Moore.
Next he added faux beams into he dormer to create a cottage feeling and add loads of charm. He also beefed up the window trim.
The true game changer of the room is the window. The chunky trim mentioned earlier was added to balance out the window scale, but it still wasn’t right. The window was very clearly a newer vinyl slider and ruined the “cozy cottage” vibe. So I went to Matthew with an image of a window with diamond mullions and said… what if????
After seeing my inspo, like the amazing man he is, he created these diamond pattern shutters to give the illusion of millions. Now when the window shutters are closed they look so charming and they absolutely have the cottage vibe I was going for. The window is still fully operable and it looks adorable from outside too!
Next we did an IKEA billy bookcase hack. Using the pre-made systems paired with our own DIY upper shelves, trim and moulding we created these very custom bookshelves made to fit this very quirky space. LOVE them! They will ultimately be painted Copley Grey by Benjamin Moore.
Now comes the fun part… decorating. Scale was a massive consideration here, and making sure we brought in a good balance of warm woods and light fabrics to ensure the space felt cozy and warm but didn’t lose the airy feeling. The room is small, and we didn’t want it to feel smaller, but instead cozy and welcoming… like a hug. I think we succeeded.
We are absolutely in love with this space and use it every single day.
