We moved house recently. The new place is a good-sized, four-bedroom home, but we had come from an enormous place with oversized bedrooms and large living spaces with lots of nooks and crannies in which to put writing desks.

I work from home as a writer, so I need a space. But in the new house, it didn’t seem that there was any place left for my desk. All the bedrooms were claimed by the kids, of course, and my original plan to put my stuff in the living room just didn’t look right. Which left me with a problem.

Where could I put my little home office?

One solution could have been in a spare, walk through space that leads into one of the bedrooms, but with no windows and no natural light, I couldn’t bear the thought. I like to be able to see the daylight. Working each day in the dark with the light on seemed like a perfect recipe for depression.

The next option was to put it in the family room just off the kitchen. It started there and lasted two weeks before I realised that I don’t like to work in public. My words need to be nurtured in secret, with no eyes looking on. I don’t want to carry the stress of constant, inevitable interruptions.

There was nowhere else… or so it seemed.

My husband and I walked around the house, looking everywhere, imagining solutions. The garage? Too small and too dark. Go to the library down the road every day? I like things set up a certain way.

Finally, I looked into the laundry and found the space. ‘I’ll go there,’ I told my husband.

He looked doubtful. ‘Really? With the washing machine droning on? Is there room?’

‘It can work.’

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The story of the laundry thus far

When we had first moved in, I had looked unhappily at the laundry. It was a normal size—smallish, with a door to the garden at one end, a fixed sink in the middle, and a large, double-doored cupboard at the other, which looked good for storage. But the space wasn’t useable. If you put the washer and dryer on the floor, you couldn’t open the cupboard. And there was nowhere for the sorting shelf for clean clothes.

I decided to close the door to the garden first up, giving me more room for my sorting shelf. We would have to keep the washer and dryer on the floor, as I didn’t have any brackets to mount the dryer, but this meant that the double cupboard doors were still an issue. I looked at them more closely. The cupboard was just a space, with shelves mounted on the wall inside. They could easily be removed—as could the doors.

‘Can you take the doors off?’ I asked my brother, who was helping us unpack. He’s a handy kinda guy who knows his way around a toolbox. Unfortunately, he hadn’t brought his (large) toolbox, and we still hadn’t found our (small) set of tools amongst the piles of boxes littering the house.

‘I can try,’ he said. There literally was no screwdriver to be found, so he removed the doors with a kitchen knife! My hero.

Immediately the laundry had 80 centimetres more space at one end. I took the shelves off the wall and decided to fill the space with bookshelves that we already had, creating a good storage area for all the bits and pieces that you need at home, but don’t want to keep on display.

(Left) The desk was way too public in the room off the kitchen. I couldn’t handle being ‘seen’ so much. (centre) I wish I had taken pictures of the double doors, but once they were removed, this is the furniture that went into the space…. (right) … and quickly got filled up.

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Turning it into an office

When we decided that the desk would be best in the laundry, while still also using the room as a laundry, there were a few things to consider. First, we would have to free up more space by stacking the washer and dryer. Luckily, I’d discovered that the dryer could sit on the front loader washer simply by using a stacking mat, made of thick foam. We had something similar already, so that was a quick fix.

Second, all the great ‘bits and pieces’ storage would have to come out and the items redistributed around the house in various places. It took a bit of thinking to find new homes for tools, bags, shoe cleaning stuff, light bulbs, electrical cords and chemicals, but with a little bit of shifting, it worked out fine. Once the shelving units were out of the space, my desk could go in.

I purchased a white cube shelf, together with some canvas ‘drawers’ and sat it on top of an unused kitchen cabinet that we had found in the garage. The sit-stand desk (with wind-up handle) slotted nicely into the space—almost as if it had been made for it. I hung my pictures and photographs around the wall, taking care to cover the marks on the walls that had been made by the previous shelving bits that were attached to the walls, and brought my adjustable stool into the room.

It was still missing something though. There was no distinctive differentiation between ‘laundry area’ and ‘desk area’. A rug would do the trick, I decided, and called my Mum. She had a few small Pakistani carpets from years ago… perhaps one was being unused? My hunch was right; she had a red prayer rug that was in a cupboard. “It’s in the way,” she told me. “You can have it.” I picked it up, popped it in, and decided the office was complete.

I feel cozy writing in here, the interruptions are few and far between, and as an added bonus, the room where the desk had been feels much happier and friendlier as well. Winning.

If you stand in the doorway of the laundry and turn your head left to right, this is what you see. ‘Laundry’ on the left. ‘Home office’ on the right.

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Have you turned an unlikely space into a home office? I’d love to hear about it.

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