The finished studio!

One of the things that made us fall in love with this house (beside the property, the location, the front porch, our instant vision for updates), was the unfinished space above the garage.

Since both Ryan and I work from home, having a dedicated office space that is larger than our previous one (see it here) and slightly separate from the house was high on our house search wish list.

When we saw the 600 square feet of unfinished space with good light, plenty of head room, storage along one wall and an entrance off the garage, it was love at first sight (at least for me).

Over the past month – among the making-over of the kitchen and changing of light fixtures and unpacking of boxes – we set to work on finishing out the studio.

While we are happy DIYers, there are some jobs that are just better to hire out to the professionals. This was one of them. Maybe if we didn’t have 12 million other projects in the house going on at the same time (and if there was not massive drywall fixing to do) we could have tackled this, but our goal was to have the studio finished as soon as possible and we knew our limitations. We hired out the framing, drywall, painting, floor install and trim and could not be happier with how it turned out.

Last night I was up there doing the final cleaning before I can start moving in all of my stuff and I can’t wait!

Before it is filled with office-y things, I snapped a handful of photos to show how the space looks all finished out.

Ready to see our new studio?!

You get to the studio from the garage up a set of rough stairs. We will paint the treads and finish the walls at some point.

While we kept the doorway as it was, we reframed around it to enclose the window into the stairwell. It was a little bit of a weird space before with the window half covered by a wall and we wanted to open that up to allow for as much light as possible.

Framing out that wall also gave us a flat wall for hanging Ryan’s giant white board with storage under.

Framing in the stairs differently also gave us a space for storage to the right of the door. We’re on the hunt for a salvaged door for the storage room and will finish up the trim once the door is in.

The big dormers are such a great feature of the space.

When you come up the stairs and walk through the door, you see to the end wall with the window.

There is another dormer on this side that lets in great light (well, except for when I took photos this morning – it’s pretty dark and dreary out today).

On the far wall is another storage area that runs the whole length of the room behind that short wall.

We’ll find a little door for that space as well.

Isn’t it a great space?! We are really happy with how it turned out.

There were only a few design decisions to be made in here.

The first was the wall color. We went with Shoji White by Sherwin Williams in eggshell finish which is the same white we are using in the house. It keeps things consistent, makes touchups easy (only one can of paint!) and the warmth of the white works well for this house and property that tends to be pretty dark.

The next decision was the trim. We went with 5″ baseboard flat mdf. Easy, inexpensive, clean looking.

Our trim guy started the windows with the top and bottom pieces cut longer to frame out the vertical pieces. It was fine and a very typical way to frame windows, but it wasn’t what I had in mind. I felt terrible telling him to take it all down and start over, but what I wanted was minimal, simple, modern and the overhanging trim felt more craftsman. He thought I was crazy for just wanting straight trim but I’m so happy with it.

We opted to paint the trim the same white as the walls (Shoji White) but in semi-gloss.

Our original plan for the floors was to do DIY plywood planks and paint them glossy white. I still love that idea. When it really came down to it, what we needed were quick floors instead of ones that were time intensive and would take weeks for the paint to fully cure.

We ended up going with laminate flooring in a very nice neutral color called Lakeshore Pecan. Our friends have it in their garage apartment (where we lived for six weeks before moving in here) and it looks great, doesn’t sound clicky when you walk on it and the color is really good. It also happens to be just about the cheapest laminate floor available at Home Depot, so that’s a win.

Ryan installed six can lights in the ceiling for additional lighting and the two fixtures above the dormers will be replaced with these new lights that I ordered last night.

I don’t have a solid plan for furniture yet and the garage is full of all the boxes of office stuff that needs to make its way up there, so I have some work to do this week!

Just for fun, here are the before and after shots side by side.

Ooooh, I can’t wait to start working in here!