How To Create A Cloffice

How to create a cloffice.

This is one of my older posts from 2017 but I wanted to revisit it, with so many of us continuing to work remotely it is still relevant! I recently posted a home office makeover on a budget if you are looking for more tips.

The Background

Back in 2017 my now sister-In-law Amy wanted to create a cloffice, combining her closet and a home office. She used to work as a graphic designer for Kidsbooks. They had closed their Boston office and she suddenly had the need to work from her apartment. Sound familiar?!

This project will always hold a special place in my heart! It was my first official project launching my organizing business. Amy and I were talking about our passion projects/side gigs, and I told her about my organizing work. She gave me the opportunity to help her transform her closet into a functioning cloffice! We had a lot of fun working on this, I hope you enjoy the transformation!

1. Get inspired.

We started this process by sharing a Pinterest board and both pinned some pictures to come up with the inspiration for the look and feel. This is what inspired Amy to add a fresh coat of paint to the room- it took some additional work but the end product was worth it!

2. Space Plan.

Apartment living is all about maximizing your space, and creating a multipurpose room is a great way to do this. An important element of a multipurpose room is creating different zones. We put clothes on one side of the room, and the desk/ office supplies on the other.

3. Purge, Sort, Contain.

During the first session, we went through all shoes and clothes, creating piles for keep, donate, sell, and throw. We moved off-season clothes to a bin in storage. When we were finished, we had eliminated the length of an entire rack of clothing, and had several bags worth of clothes to donate. Next we moved onto papers, crafts, and memorabilia. Amy already had a lot of great storage and design elements to work with, so she didn’t need to buy much. I gave Amy some homework to do over the next few weeks and she was well on her way to a completely new cloffice.

4. Know that it will get worse before it gets better.

It’s so important to embrace the during stage of organization. We are so used to seeing the instant gratification of before and after photos, but often times the middle of an organizing looks worse than the before. Amy had a great sense of humor about this phase, and sent me this picture of her living room, which had turned into a huge mess while she added a fresh coat of paint to her new room. If you are going through this, my advice would be to take a break and come back to it with a fresh set of eyes.