One Room Challenge Spring 2024 – Home Office/Hobby Room (Week 1)

I’ve been meaning to declutter/fix up my current home office/hobby room (home office is probably misleading because I really only get to work virtually once every other week, so it’s more so the latter), so what better a time to join in on the One Room Challenge than now?!

If you’ve never heard of this, it’s a bi-annual challenge that takes place every spring + fall — participants pick a room to transform and share their progress throughout the course of 8 weeks followed by a reveal on week 8!

One Room Challenge (Spring 2024): Home Office/Hobby Room

About Me

If you’re new here, I’m Farrah! By day, I work full-time as a family medicine physician. I have a panel of 2500+ patients, so in the ever-decreasing pockets of spare time I have, I delve into my gazillion hobbies to stay sane.

This blog contains recipes, previous travels, and excerpts of my life and adventures throughout grad school, medical school, residency, and my life now as an attending physician, so this whole home decor thing is a whole new arena for me. (The only DIY things I’ve ever done so far = making fairly simple dance costumes, e.g. this ti leaf hip hei, + some skin care stuffs.)

This is what I like, but we’ll see how feasible it actually is with what I have…

About This Space

We moved into our house almost 2 years ago and the room I chose for this challenge is one of the extra bedrooms! My partner is a minimalist (“if it’s not used daily, it doesn’t deserve space on the counter”) and I am a sentimental packrat with zero-waste/I-can-use-this-for-something tendencies.

We are DINKs  (dual-income-no-kids), so when we were dividing up space, we decided the downstairs living room would be his (he likes the cold + and his desk is too ginormous to fit in any of the extra bedrooms). I claimed this room because it’s warmer (I’m forever an ice cube) + my collection of books (and stuff in general) is seemingly infinite.

This was what the staging company did prior to us getting this house and, while beautiful, this would only  ever work if you didn’t need a computer in your office. For me, last year’s discovery of my long-lost cookbook collection also made the minimalist styling of the shelves impossible.

I mainly hang out in this room for all my indoor hobbies, e.g. playing games on my PC/Nintendo Switch, blogging, reading, journaling, and attempting to learn to paint/crochet. It’s also my cat’s favorite room, so I’ll be trying to make it extra comfy for her too. <3 (I often fall asleep in here with her + would love to get a human-sized dog bed, but space is an issue.)

Goals

Since I unfortunately still have a lot of student loans to pay off, I’m trying to keep the spending at a minimum. By the end of this though, I’d like to have done the following:

• D.e.c.l.u.t.t.e.r.
• Shelve all my books. (I know the collection looks a lil cray right now + there’s actually another 30-ish books I need to put up there…but it’s ever-changing since I will be donating the ones I didn’t like as much to nearby Little Free Libraries!)
• Revamp/decorate tea trolley.
• Organize plant shelf.
• Designate a reading space.
• Carve out storage space for bullet journal/painting supplies, camping/backpacking stuffs, dance costumes/accessories…
• Paint pots/desk? (Still debating!)
• Make + decorate my koi lanterns! (I’d like to make em’ climb up the wall, but need to figure out a way to hide the wires…)
• Figure out wall decor!

The shelves are a semi-organized chaos right now…

Here is a super rough outline of what I think I’ll be doing.

• Week 1: Intro
• Week 2: Decluttering the world (+ before photos)
• Week 3: Organize bookshelves/tea shelf + fix up reading area
• Week 4: Organize craft space + cable management
• Week 5: Painting + tea trolley revamp
• Week 6: Lighting + wall decor
• Week 7: Let’s be real, something else will come up
• Week 8: The Reveal!

• Is there a room you’ve been meaning to decorate/fix up? It’s not too late to join!
• Do you have any tips for me? Fingers crossed that this goes well, hahaha.