home office

Decorating, building storage and installing the fold-down bed.

Recently we have been focusing on decorating the office and completing the built-in furniture in here. Given that we have always worked from home, and will continue to do so in this house, we wanted a space that was connected to the main living area but that could also function as a spare bedroom whenever we would need it. The challenge then was to incorporate the bed but in such a way that meant we didn’t have to partially dismantle or alter the office functions of the room. We designed this room to have the windows facing south, which gave us a long blank wall on the east elevation, on which we constructed a complete built-in furniture wall, with shelving, cupboards and integrated fold-down bed.

Firstly, however, we needed to prepare the walls for decorations, as some of the plastering in this room was less than perfect!

We used kitchen storage from IKEA to reduce costs, and integrated drawers and cupboards with bespoke MDF shelving. We had to seal off the room from the rest of the house while we filled and sanded the bad bits of the walls and ceiling.

We then installed the integrated fold-down bed, which came as a pre-installed kit. We used a matching IKEA door on it’s side above the bed on some stud framing in order to give us a panel on which to install some lights and the smoke detector.

Finally, we got to do the fun parts! Hanging some artwork and wallpapering the underside of the fold-down bed so that it is disguised when folded away!