Before and After: A $250 Accent Wall Turns a Craft Room into a Chic Home Office

Designated craft rooms are what dream Instagram feeds and Pinterest boards are made of. And when Heather Bergman moved into her 1921 home several years ago, she was thrilled to have one of her very own.

But then IRL happened. “The room became a catch-all and wasn’t functional for me. I avoided even going in there because it was overwhelming,” says Heather. “The concept of a craft room no longer fit my needs. I noticed that I didn’t actually use the room as I intended to. When I worked on a craft project, I was doing it in my living room watching Netflix.”

Heather realized she didn’t need a craft room anymore, but she did need an office with storage options for supplies, paperwork, and craft items. So she got to work.

The biggest and most time-consuming change she made involved installing a tracked shelving unit on top of a newly painted accent wall. “I decided to spray-paint all of the brackets and wall tracks gold, and dry time for spray paint in winter when it’s 40 degrees or less outside isn’t ideal,” Heather says. Luckily, she had another set of hands available for installation. “My boyfriend helped me, and it took us less than two hours,” she says. “One of the setbacks that we ran into was that the heads of the screws I bought were too small for the holes in the wall tracks. This was easily fixed by using washers.”

For the shelves themselves, Heather spent a while contemplating wood. “The cheaper boards at the hardware store were warped, so I finally went with furniture-grade boards, which were more expensive but worth it,” she explains. Building the shelving unit and also painting the walls cost less than $250, Heather says.

In addition to crafting the shelving, Heather purged, rearranged, and reorganized the room, and spent about $250 on a vintage desk from Facebook Marketplace and a chair from Amazon. Another approximately $50 went to curtains, storage boxes, and vintage label maker tape. 

Next up, Heather plans to put together a wall of built-ins, but she already feels like she has so much more storage and that the design better matches the rest of her home’s aesthetic.

Oh, and major bonus: “There’s also a ton of new space for plants,” says Heather, “which in a room with three walls of windows is a must.”

Inspired? Submit your own project here.