Our home office is out of control! The following post may contain disturbing scenes of a messy office. Viewer discretion is advised!

The office space is a mishmash of items and catchall of furniture that we don’t have a place for in the rest of the house. For instance, our worktop is a dining room table placed on top of some filing cabinets. The antique dresser is one that hubs refinished and surprised me with when we were married. It’s there because there isn’t another place for it in the house. The office is at the bottom of the list of projects we have planned for the house.

Since we’re gaining an hour to daylight savings time, I’m taking advantage of that hour to de-clutter our office. It’s a funny thing how living in a state of chaos can seem normal on a day-to-day basis. It wasn’t until I decided to reupholster my office chair, and moved it from the office to my craft studio to work on it, that I was ready to face how out-of-hand the clutter in our office space had become! Once I walked back in with a temporary chair, this is the site that beheld me:

Ugh! What an absolute mess! I knew I had to do something to bring back order out of the chaos. I started with purging all the unnecessary paperwork.

Once I was pared back to the bare essentials, the one-hour solution was underway.

I picked up the metal retail rack shown above from a store that was moving to another location and no longer needed it. It served me well in my former craft studio, however I didn’t have room for it in my new studio space. I thought I’d give it a try to tame the clutter in the office. The last time I used a storage tower to organize, it was to corral all my shoes, and that turned out great so what did I have to lose?

I positioned the tower in the space between my desk and antique dresser. Then I added a few Bygel storage cups on the horizontal rails for smaller items  – found for 1/2 price at Ikea when they were discontinued – to hold things such as pens, USB sticks and battery chargers. I started filling the shelves, and it was going well, but once I stepped back I realized that I was just concentrating all the clutter in one spot. It was almost as bad as looking at it all spread out!

I quickly thought up a great solution to hide the view of clutter on the front of the tower. I brought some of my printed cartoon canvasses out of storage and added two picture hangers to the back.

Because I challenged myself to get this done in one hour, I merely stuck the metal hangers on with packing tape and then bent them at an angle.

The tape was surprisingly secure, since the canvasses are light, and the hangers are pretty stiff once they’re bent so will hold their shape.

All I had to do was hook them onto a horizontal rail and let gravity hold them in place. I spaced five of them all the way down the tower to cover the front.

These canvasses were just the thing I needed to give me something pleasant (and humorous) to look at. To print your own 8″ x 10″ art canvasses using your home computer, check out my tutorial.

I added some ‘S’-hooks onto the sides of the tower to hang items I wanted to have quick access to; they’ll allow me to grab things I use frequently, such as my camera, cords, scissors and clipboards etc.

I also added a few rare earth magnets in one spot for my tape measure:

The magnets stick to the metal clip on the back of the tape measure to keep it in place. Hubs and I got to the point where we were constantly loosing tape measures around the house and repurchasing them to have on-hand. We must have a collection of at least a dozen (or two!) around the house but can never seem to find one when we need it. The tape measure dilemma has been a running joke between us for as long as we’ve been married. If I’m diligent about returning it to where it belongs, the hope is that I’ll never lose it again! A girl can hope, can’t she?

After only an hour of organizing the storage tower, I had clutter free surfaces again! I’m happy with how it turned out; now everything has a designated spot. Even my box of Kleenex found a place on one of the shelves.

For some ideas on how to embellish your office, and get it even more organized, check out my ‘inspire’-themed office decor:

Now that the office is under control, in the next few weeks I’ll  show you how to reupholster this office chair:

If you’re interested in seeing the office chair makeover, be sure to follow us here on Birdz of a Feather or on Bloglovin’!

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