If your home does not have a dedicated office, you might find your “office” spread throughout your home. Your dining room table is your desk, the nearest bookshelf contains some binders, your kitchen drawer holds office supplies and the hallway houses your file cabinet. Just because you don’t have the one room to bring it all together doesn’t mean you can’t be organized on a smaller level. A secretary desk is the perfect solution for bringing all these items into one space.
A typical secretary desk has a fold-down desk with plenty of storage above and below in the form of cabinets or open shelves. You can easily find your own secretary desk and make it fit in with your style through some simple alterations. This Hemnes secretary desk was purchased from IKEA. Labeled storage boxes fill the shelves, leaving plenty of room for a fabric-covered cork board. The cabinet below the desk houses the home printer, more office supplies and a file folder box. An entire home office consolidated into one small space!
Since this secretary desk was going to be placed in the living room, it needed to be dressed up a bit to match the existing décor. The center portion of each top door was cut out with a jigsaw. A sheet of mirrored acrylic was then cut to size and mounted to the back of each door. Fretwork from O’verlays in the Khloe pattern was then glued onto the front of the “mirror” using Liquid Nails. Paintable caulk was added to fill in any gaps and then touched up with white paint.
Once the doors were completed and dried, they were reattached to the desk. The mirrored acrylic was so lightweight that there was no issue with reattachment, unlike heavy glass mirrors! The existing knobs were replaced with glass knobs to lighten up the whole look. The glass knobs blended right in and did not distract from the mirrored fretwork.
Secretary desks are easy to find at flea markets, yard sales and estate sales. A coat of paint and some new hardware can often make an older piece feel brand new. If you do not have a room to dedicate to a home office, you can create the perfect space anywhere by combining rooms in your home.
Maybe you would like to have a guest room but you don’t always have guests. That room can do double duty as an office with a secretary desk off to one side. Or your office might have recently become a nursery. Work can still get done when it needs to by leaving a secretary desk in that space as well. Keep some children’s books or family heirlooms on display to help it blend in. Once the desk doors are closed, it can look like any other storage pieces. Secretary desks are versatile enough that they can blend into any room. They can work hard all day, but when your work is done, you can simply pack up your “office” by closing the doors!