3 Secrets to Making Your Own Custom Home Office Furniture
There’s no doubt that having custom home office furniture makes it so much more fulfilling to work at home. Now, imagine if you made those pieces of furniture yourself, wouldn’t your motivation for success be so much stronger? It is much cheaper than having your furniture built by a professional, and it doesn’t take the skills of a master carpenter or even the know-how of a life-long handyman to do it. You can do it, and all it takes are the three secrets in this article!
Here’s a clue — nobody ever said that you had to build everything from scratch. Making furniture that is customized to your particular needs and to exactly fit your new home office space is a hundred times easier with these 3 secrets: Rebuild, Re-purpose, and Refinish.
To rebuild means to look at stuff you already own, or small pieces you find at yard sales, close-outs and the like, with an eye to recombining them into something new. Take a pair of small stools for example, and a small set of drawers. Ideally, look for ones that are a bit lower than your hip. If you need to, cut off a bit from the stool legs so that they are the same height as the drawers. Now get an old table top with missing legs or a sheet of 1-inch thick plywood, lay it on top of the drawers and stool so that it forms a table. A few nails, a bit of sanding, painting and polish, and you have a unique table you built yourself. It will only be up to your patience and supply of elbow grease as to how professional looking the finished product will be.
Re-purposing is easy. Old serving trays can become your table in- and out-box, those touristy cups and mugs you used to collect in your travels can be your pen holders, and finish off with the homey touch of an antique bottle turned into a flower vase.
Refinishing is done according to your particular taste, and in fact, it’s the easiest way to turn something mass-produced and store-bought into something entirely your own. Some people like their custom home office furniture to all have colors that come from a certain matching palette they learned from an interior design magazine, some like the curio-shop flavor of pieces that obviously come from different places and different times. Your taste may lie anywhere between the two, or even beyond. All you will need is imagination and possibly some paint, lacquer, sandpaper and finishing techniques and instructions that are widely available on the internet and in books, and you can make that filing cabinet that just came from the yard-sale down the road into something with a bit of your personality in it.
Remember, your office doesn’t have to look like the gray cubicle you used to slave in when you were an employee. As long as you’re comfortable working in it, and it has everything you need, it will be perfect. If it has custom home office furniture that you rebuilt, re-purposed, and refinished yourself, well, that makes it even more than perfect.
