It’s time to tackle another project on my 2021 home goals to-do list – our office closet. When we added our DIY office built-ins, the amount of storage in our office skyrocketed. I now have four deep drawers, four deep cabinets, and a boatload of shelves for all of my belongings. Because of this, the closet in this room has always been an afterthought. That is, until now.

Our Office Closet Before

Here’s a look at how this little corner has evolved since we bought our house in May, 2019. We replaced the flooring, trim, doors, and painted everything right away. Then, last year, we gave the entire office a makeover. However, that closet stayed untouched, besides getting a fresh coat of the paint color Valspar’s “Chimney Smoke” to match our built-ins. Right now, it holds our file cabinet and an old dresser from IKEA that we used to use in our condo. It’s also a dumping ground for other random stuff.

The good thing about this little closet is that it’s actually pretty big and deep for an office closet. With the right tools, we realized we could turn it into a useful space.

PAX System from IKEA

Finn and I are very familiar with the closet systems from IKEA since we installed the PAX system in our main bedroom’s closet.

We learned a lot from that project and made a few mistakes along the way. Here are those blog posts if you want to give them a read.

• Planning our IKEA Closet
• Installing our IKEA Closet
• Organized Closet Reveal

We absolutely love our bedroom closet and the system still works wonderfully for us. We knew that an IKEA office closet was the way to go for this project.

Designing an IKEA Office Closet

The IKEA planning tool has always been a huge pain in the butt. (We used it for our laundry room design and the main bedroom closet. However, IKEA finally upgraded and now their software is 100 times better! Rejoice!

Here’s how it works. First, I recommend making an IKEA account so you can save your designs. You’ll then go to the “planner” drop-down near your account name and click that. It will take you to a screen where you can click on the planner based on the product you’ll be using. We ended up trying out a few different ones, but in the end, we knew that the PAX system was what we wanted to use again.

You can then click “design your own” and it will take you to their tool to start designing your space. Have the measurements of your closet handy so you can input them into their online design tool.

On the right hand side, you can slide the bars to get the correct height, width, and depth of your room or closet. Our closet is 96 inches high, 52 inches wide, and 39 inches deep. With those numbers in the system, we were able to start playing around with the tool to create our new IKEA office closet.

When figuring out how we wanted to design the closet, the first thing we did was discuss what we wanted to store in here. Here’s a little list of the items we want to keep in here…

• File cabinet
• My photography equipment (including upright tripods)
• Electronics and cords
• Wrapping paper
• Extra home decor
• Office supplies and paper

With that list in mind, we designed the closet, and here’s where we landed with two PAX frames of different sizes.

The right side will have lots of smaller drawers for office supplies, electronics, and extra cords. We then want the area above it to be pretty tall, so we can store wrapping paper and other tall items. To the left, we will have our file cabinet built into that little nook, with standing room on the left of it for my tripods. Above that, we’ll have lots of deep shelves that can be adjusted, based on what we want to store there. I’m thinking we’ll have baskets for some items to keep things as organized as possible.

As you go through the planning process, the total price of your order will update in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. This is nice because you can stay on budget and trade things out accordingly.

The good thing about the PAX system is that once you have the large frames installed, you can easily move things around or buy new pieces to customize them. So, if this room  becomes a bedroom someday, it can easily be converted into a more traditional closet with a bar to hang clothes and more drawers.

Kicking Off Our Closet Plan

Instead of making a trip to IKEA, we ordered everything online and paid a small delivery fee. It was so worth it not to have to spend a day in IKEA during a pandemic and cramming everything into our car. I highly recommend going this route if you can! The supplies have been sitting in our garage for a few weeks now.

We need at least a day or two to get our new office closet installed and I think both Finn and I will have to work together to get it done. So, I’m hoping we can squeeze this project into an upcoming weekend. (Maybe my mom can come over to hang with Rory while we work!) I’ll keep you posted on our progress. I can’t wait to add another organized spot to our house.

Casey

Catch Up on the Closet Project

• Designing the Office Closet
• Installing the Office Closet
• Organizing the Office Closet