Planning a Masculine and Organized Home Office

I admit, sometimes I feel bad for Donnie! He puts in so much work around here, always going along with my crazy projects, and rarely is he the primary beneficiary of all of his work.

I mean, sure, he likes to have a nice kitchen and cool built-ins in the living room, but we've never re-done a space on the blog that was completely his. In fact, in our last house his office was an 8' x 8' dark hole in the basement right next to the washer and dryer that had a bunch of spiders. Ick. (You can probably guess why I never showed that on the blog... 😉 )

Planning a Masculine and Organized Home Office

In this house, though, Donnie finally got a beautiful, er I mean very manly office of his own. It is on the main level of the house, right off the living room...

You can see the door to Donnie's office to the right of the built ins.

It's not a huge space, but it gets great light and it faces the back of our lot, which also means he gets the beautiful view.

Donnie's office on the day we moved in

view from the back of our house

Like most of the rooms in the house, when we moved in, he gathered up whatever storage furniture he could find and did the best with what he had. Unfortunately, it wasn't working amazingly well. If you can remember from our one year home tour a few weeks ago, it was looking like this:

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The biggest problem was that Donnie had a ton of stuff he wanted to store in a not-so-huge space. He is a bit of a book junkie, so most of his shelves were taken up with those. He also keeps all of our video equipment in his office, and that collection seems to be growing and growing. He has a lot of hobbies, and he wanted to store things like fishing gear and ping pong paddles in his office. He even had a rowing machine taking up a ton of space!

In addition to the storage situation, Donnie was also in a bit of a conundrum with his desk. When we moved in, he decided to just use his standing desk that we built and planned to use his POANG chair with his laptop if he wanted to sit down to work.

When we started doing more video, though, we got a desktop computer for him to use for editing which "lives" on the standing desk, so he was either having to stand for hours to edit or use a stool, which ended up being at a weird height and wasn't ideal ergonomically.

After witnessing all of these issues firsthand, when it was time to decide on our next house project, I suggested that we tackle Donnie's office next... and I don't know that I've ever seen him so excited!!

He asked for my input at times, but I let him have total control over all of the furnishings, storage, and design elements in the space-- he's the one that will be using it after all! After doing a bunch of research (because Donnie does nothing without doing a bunch of research first 😉 ), here is the design plan we came up with:

Lamp | Chair | Paint Color | Storage System | Lamp Base | Lamp Shade | Desk Chair | Desk | Bamboo Shade

To fix Donnie's storage issues, we decided to go with the Elfa shelving system from The Container Store. We've never used this system before, but when we first visited the new location of The Container Store in Pittsburgh, Donnie became a little bit obsessed with the Elfa shelves and knew he wanted to use them right away.

In addition to filling the back wall of the office with Elfa storage, he also planned to have a smaller section of the Elfa elements near his chair on the other side of the office to act as a side table and provide storage for smaller items. (And also to look cool, as he says. 🙂 )

To solve his desk issue, Donnie found the Jarvis bamboo adjustable standing desk from Fully that can go back and forth between sitting and standing height. It is motorized, so the up and down motions are very smooth, and we won't have to worry about the desktop computer toppling over while it's moving!

As with all of the windows in our house, Donnie is planning to trim out the windows in his space with chunky craftsman style window trim to add some character. We also already have the same blinds we used in the living room waiting to be installed in his space.

He's planning to keep his POANG chair and footrest, and he also found another IKEA chair he liked for his desk.

After going through just about every gray paint sample on the planet, we decided on Behr Chain Reaction. It is a darker shade of gray than I would normally choose, but I think it will be perfect in Donnie's space and give the masculine vibe that he's going for.

Other than that, we'll bring in a few lamps and hang some art (most of which we already had from our last house!), and that will be it!

I am excited to see this project unfold over the next few weeks so Donnie can finally have the dream office he's always wanted! He definitely deserves it!

Update: Donnie's office is finished! You can see the other posts about his space here:

Planning a Masculine and Organized Home Office  (You're here!)

How to Install Elfa Shelving from The Container Store

An Organized + Masculine Home Office: Reveal!

Stay tuned for some fun updates coming next week, and let me know in the comments if you've used the Elfa shelving system before! I'd love to know what you've thought of it!

Hope you're having a wonderful week, friends!

This post contains affiliate links. For more information, see my disclosures here.