Our New Office Pictures + details on how we spent our budget.

It has been six years since I started this website. If you remember that two years ago we turned our attic into an office space, but we have since outgrown it. Not necessarily that we needed more office space (but it helps), but we needed more space for our kids to play. If you remember, we were *this* close to moving just a couple months ago.

We were feeling really stretched and having a hard time separating work from family, and vice versa. It was becoming a struggle for me to have my employees walk all the way through my dirty house to get to their desk in my office, so after much prayer and consideration we moved into an office space a few weeks ago!

Before I get into the details of the office renovation, here’s why this made so much financial sense to us. Our 1,850 square foot house works for our family, even if it’s a bit tight at times. But our family PLUS an office with a couple employees? Nope. That’s why we looked into buying another house with a larger detached office space. We found some that might work, but our mortgage payment and mortgage debt would have more than doubled.

This 600 square foot space is only costing us $600 a month for a year lease! If we add our current mortgage payment to that $600, we are paying LESS than we would have had we moved to a larger home, plus we aren’t locked in long-term. Oh, and we don’t have to move (which is a huge win).

Ok – enough with the numbers – onto the renovation details!

My friend Carmella Smith is an interior decorator so I asked her to help me decorate the space. The past two weeks have been doing a lot of shopping, and we had a budget of $2,500 for the entire 600 square foot space.

We found a beautiful historical building with space to lease in our hometown of Oswego, NY. We love old homes and knew that having our office in a 200+ year old home was going to be perfect!

This is what the space looked like before we moved in. Our landlord patched the walls, painted and put in new flooring for us before we took over the lease.

And now…the new space!

Now look at the office!  I am SO in love!

Let me tell you about where we spent our budget, but first of all, you can see that we have four desks. That is because we have grown and we now have 2 employees that work with us part time during the week. On the right side of this picture, my desk is the one closest to the wall, and the desk with its back to the picture is my assistant Dariel’s. Mark’s desk is the one on the left closest to the wall, and my brother-in-law Ben’s desk is the one almost out of the picture on the right. Ben helps us with product creation, podcast editing, and much much more!

If you look into the conference room, I got the table at a second hand store for only $125!  The chairs I got here on Amazon for $50.00 a piece (a splurge for me!)  The shelves on the walls next to our desks were made from shelf brackets and stair planks. You can buy the wooden stair planks at any home store, then stain them to your liking and put up on the wall using shelf brackets.

The rug was from Wayfair and only $150 for an 8 x 10!

Next up is my favorite piece of furniture. I got this mid century buffet table from the same secondhand store that I got my dining room table. It is great office storage and looks amazing!  Above it, I made a media wall where I have pictures from many of my media appearances and magazine covers. The lights above are from Ikea (only $10 each) and were spray painted gold to match the fixtures in the room.

A beautiful feature in this space was this beautiful marble fireplace. We purchased vintage books for only $1.00 each and used those for decor. The large clock above the fireplace was purchased at Hobby Lobby with a 40% off coupon!

The small lights sitting on top of the fireplace were purchased at a secondhand store for a few bucks!

Here is another view of the conference room. The wall unit was made using black shelf mounting brackets. Then we used secondhand wood planks, stained them and put them on the brackets.

The globes were from thrift stores, and many of the decor items were from IKEA.

And last but not least… my front sitting room. The windows are narrow and VERY tall throughout the space. We got extra long curtain rods and hung the curtains on the outside of the windows to appear to make them wider. And the white contrasts the colors of the chairs and wall.

The chairs were purchased from Wayfair, they are called the Aldwick Arm Chair. The rug was from Marshalls, the coffee table from Hobby Lobby, and the accessories from secondhand stores.  The curtains are 118″ long and purchased from IKEA.

You can see the original crystal chandelier hanging above which I LOVE… it is original to the house and real crystal!

There is it – the complete office space for around $2,500!  I think it turned out great and now we have a space to have meetings, do financial counseling, and grow our team.

We have two more spaces left to finish, those 2 rooms will be a podcasting/private phone room and also I will finally have a video studio so I can do more YouTube videos!  YAY!

What do you think?  What is your favorite part of the room?