How To Make A Home Office For Kids Fast: No More Waiting Around

This website is supported by its readers. If you click one of my links I may earn a commission. I am also a participant in the Amazon affiliates programme and I will also earn a commission from qualified purchases.

So you need to make a home office/study area for your kid, but let’s face it between work and your responsibilities (washing the dishes sucks) time is not on your side. 

Kids can be notoriously picky when it comes to designing their own rooms and the same can be said for setting up a homework station. Heck I know one of the things I struggled with was exactly how to set up a home office for my nieces and nephews in a super short amount of time. 

So what should be the ideal budget when making the home office for kids? And will you need to keep buying fresh furniture every year? 

Keep reading to find out more. 

Before we crack it, it’s worth mentioning if you’re not really worried about the time scales of having your kids study space completed by I’ve written a separate blog post you can find here, which is similar but goes into a lot more detail on how to set up your kids office, step-by-step. (Just a heads up a lot of people reading my blog are in the process of designing their own home office. If you want to save some of the painstaking time I did in designing my office, you can find my recommended products here)

Set yourself an end date

Trust me this is advice probably designed much more for me then any of you. I often find myself starting projects and then really struggle to get them done by then end of the month ( yeah university project deadline day was fun for me) 

You don’t need me to tell you that setting yourself an end date to have everything completed by will ensure you will get your project off to a swift start. If you have a little bit of pressure to keep you going and get things done it’s miraculous how much you can actually complete. 

A word to the wise though, when taking on any project In the first few days you will be super motivated to hammer out all the work but you need to be prepared to pace yourself as you go along before you end up burning yourself out. 

Instead be realistic in the amount of hours you can put in per day and take things from there. 

Now let’s say you just have zero time to get anything done and you have the budget feel free to reach out to home office decorating companies like Decorating Den. 

So how long does it take to make a home office for kids fast? 

Realistically with the right amount of planning beforehand you can get everything done in between 2-7 days depending on your responsibilities. 

It’s important to note however that the larger the room the longer amount of time it will take to design. Don’t forget about some of the other tasks like painting and cleaning which eat into your time but people don’t consider. 

Set a few hours per day to work on the project

Remember what I told you about earlier on about how I never managed to get project done on time? 

Well this was singlehandedly the thing that turned it around for me. 

Doing a little bit every day will ensure that you will be able to speed up the project and get things done when you need to. 

So all well and good but what are some practical tips to do this: 

1. Amend your calendar to schedule
2. Journal 
3. Use the pomodoro technique 

Amend your calendar to schedule – By amending your work calendar/home calendar and having time in to work on the kids home office means that you will have a constant reminder of the task list, giving you a little bit of pressure to get it done 

Journal – Journaling not only what you want to do for the day but also what you’ve achieved for the day is super important. It will give you positive reinforcement and help break the task down into smaller chinks 

Use the pomedoro technique – Okay what? So believe it or not the pomedoro technique was developed by Fracisco Cirillo and basically allows you to do a task for 25 mins, take a 5 minute break and then  repeat up until you’ve spend an hour and a half a=on said task. Fantastic for getting out short bursts of work. 

Now if you do follow this tip you might find halfway through that you get a little bit nervous about only doing something like an hour’s work a day, but trust me when I say in the long term you will thank me for it. The story about the hare and the tortoise is real. 

Create a list of everything that you need

Okay so you should have some ideas on how to save time when it comes to creating your kids home office. 

Now we need to plan out everything that you need. 

Now I’ve already compared kids desks in a few previous posts but to summarize I’ve included the table below: 

Desk Name

ECR4Kids

KidKraft Kids

Mount-it Adjustable

Flash Furniture

Unicoo Bamboo

So what about everything else. In my experience every kids office needs the following: 

Item	My Choice
Chair	Flash Furniture
Whiteboard/Corkboard	Amazons Basics
Laptop	ACER
Pens	Papermate
Notepad	Amazon Basics

Bear in mind this is just to cover the basics you might find that you also might need other things like fresh  paint, flooring, wallpaper  etc depending on how much of a refurbishment it is you’re  looking to do. 

You also will need to figure out if your kids home office needs other things. For example if they are doing musical lessons it might be worth investing in soundproofing, if they need a place to practice karate,it might be worth setting up a punching bag. 

Get your kids involved

Let’s face it, your kids are going to be using your study space a hell of a lot more than you are. As such it’s important to note that when you’re designing their home office they need to be involved. 

Sometimes their going to pick colours and designs you might not be happy with, but that’s okay, the happier they are, the more likely they are to study in there. 

So how do we speed up the process so  they can make their choices relatively quickly?

Well gamifcation works a treat. If you spend one hour making a game with your kids and at the end of every question they get to chosen aspect of their home office that would really go down a treat. 

So for example if you play snakes and ladders and they make it up a ladder, because they did good in the game they can  choose the colour of the walls for the rooms. 

This should hopefully keep the process moving and get the design sorted ASAP.

Look for inspiration 

Now that you are getting your kids involved their minds might wander a fair bit so it’s important to prevent them with inspiration. 

Pinterest can be a great place to look and if you narrow the options down to something like 5 design styles you can get your kids to make a decision faster than if they would if they designed it themselves. 

Even if you don’t have Pinterest you can use something like YouTube to help find some ideas. Check out the video below which can help give some pointers. 

Come up with your blueprint

One of the final steps before you actually start designing your items is to map everything out. I personally like to use an online design platform like the ones listed in this post and then use something like a duck tape map out the space on the floor where all the furniture will go. 

This should help mean when you do decide to buy items for the space you simply need to put it in it’s allocated space.  

Get an idea of how much you need to redecorate

So you’ve got the furniture but what about the style? 

One of the most important aspects will be the decoration which, for anyone who has had the pleasure of designing a new room from scratch in the past, knows just how difficult it can be. 

Again similar to the point above, narrow down the colour choices and if you want your project to be completed quickly, stick to a colour that is similar to the current rooms colour. 

This will mean you will need less coats of paint to make it look good. 

Set a budget

Okay so by now you should have got an idea on what your going to fill your kids home office with…

Are you shocked at how expensive everything adds up to?  

There is an old saying, you can have something fast and good  quality but it won’t be cheap… I don’t necessarily agree with that statement, however making sure that you set a specific budget when designing your kids office is super important. 

The last thing you want to do is spend thousands renovating only for your kid to study on the kitchen worktop or find that you could have gotten the design you wanted for a much cheaper price. 

I mean lets face it the vast majority of people reading this post aren’t millionaires.

So how do you set a budget for the kids office?

• Make a list of everything that is essential (you should have already done this).  
• Find at least five variations that are cheaper.  
• Divide up your budget by the most priciest items to the cheapest in order to see what will take the largest chunk of your cash.  
• Don’t worry about buying everything in one go, you can always buy things as you go along. 

One of the other things I would ask is try and get a second opinion, it’s very easy on creative projects like this for costs to go over when they don’t need to so it might be worth having someone else either a partner or a friend keep you in check when the money start flowing asking you if everything is essential. 

Start window shopping 

So you have an idea of your budget and the items you want. It’s going to be tempting for your kids (or you) to want to go ahead and buy the first items you see but it’s super important to window shop first. 

Give yourself a few days with no other tasks other than comparing items. 

What I like to do is for every one item I buy, compare the prices in three stores. That way you can rest assured that you are getting the most for your money. 

Adjust as you go along

One of the great things about kids is just how fascinated they are by the world and how they go through so many phases. 

Try as you might, you will most likely have to adjust your kids home office/study space as they grow older. 

Interests, workloads and sadly fun all change as you grow older. And so the needs of the office space will too. 

Heck even as a grown adult I’m sure your office will not be the same in 5 years as it is today. The  key is to acknowledge this and not fight it, embrace the change. 

There are a few things you can do to give a timeless look like not using fad colour schemes or fad products but at the end of the day so long as your kid is studying and happy then the rest is  just the icing on top. 

Finally a lot of people reading my blog want to know what products I recommend for a home office/remote working. You can find out my recommendations here and learn how I make money whilst working remotely on the side here.