garage turned office

Working for yourself from home can be interesting and sometimes presents challenges! While I have an off sight studio space that I use for most of my art making, I do all of my computer tasks (video and photo editing, editing digital artwork, blogging, writing, designing online classes, email and any business tasks) in my home office. 

For the last few years, I've used our third bedroom as my office (you can see it here, here and here) but over this last year I've I wanted to move my office outside of our living/family space. When you work from home it can feel like there is no divide between work and family and it can be tricky to have boundaries. I still need to have an office at home- I work at really odd times and enjoy the flexibility of being able to get up early or stay up late working. So Andy and I started brainstorming different options and different ways we could make our existing space work. In my dream world, we would remodel or even add onto to our home but right now this just isn't in our budget which means we needed to get creative with what we have.

The solution we came up with was moving my office into the garage. We have a two car garage that we do not park our cars in. Instead, our garage is another space that we use for storage, projects and art making. The photo above was taken before Christmas, when the space was a MESS. But after we cleaned, organized and made space we decided the best and most economical option was to build two moveable walls that could create a cubicle office.

A while back, Andy built moveable walls for my studio space- you can see them HERE. I've worked in galleries where you often find a hollow wall that can be painted, moved and changed depending on the exhibit or creative project. I love my studio moveable walls- they are a really great way to divide space, change the space and also can be used as a backdrop for photography and art. 

Andy built two light weight walls (removable walls) for our garage that are braced together to create a small cubicle that measures about 7ft x 9ft. It takes up one corner of the garage and the rest is still open with enough space to store all our junk (bikes, surfboards, beach gear, etc).

We moved my entire office set up into this space and it has made a world of difference for me! I love that I am able to step away from our living space to go to work (even working a few feet away from our home and family life make a difference for my mindset). The best part is that I actually have more space than I did our in our spare room and also have an entire wall of counter space for creative projects.

For about $150 we were able to add some additional space. And while I hope some day we will be able to renovate our home, I am happy that we found a creative solution that works for today!

p.s. you can read about how I stretched my huge canvas and created my big quote painting HERE