Upcycle Your Way to a More Organised Office

Upcycling is all the rage right n ow: taking unloved, unused items and rejuvenating them for a new purpose is eco-friendly, cost-effective and very fashionable for businesses that want to be seen as being cool and quirky. But how can you get involved in the upcycling trend and be a little more organised as a result? Well, here are some ideas…

Use empty cans for stationery storage

One of the quickest and easiest ways to get more organised in your office is to clear up your desk space. So, all those pens and pencils cluttering up the area? Pop them in a container. However, it’d be boring to simply buy a plastic, mass-produced pot, so why not recycle those empty tin cans once you’re finished with them in the kitchen?

Simply wash them out, file down the sharp edge (so that you don’t accidentally cut yourself when your reach for a pen), and add your stationery. Remove the label and leave the tins uncovered if you want to emulate the ‘industrial’ trend in your office space (complete with exposed brickwork and pendant lights), or give each tin a coat of bright paint if you fancy something more cheerful.

Fix wheels to furniture so you can move it around

Another great upcycling hack is to take a piece of furniture (be it a chair, a storage cabinet or a desk) and fix some castor wheels to it. This is a great idea as it will allow you to easily wheel furniture around the office, moving it to accommodate for growth in staff numbers or allowing you to effortlessly switch up the room if the design is feeling a bit stale! You can buy castor wheels from somewhere like Tente Castors, and the great thing is that they come in lots of different colours if you want to inject some cheer into your environment. Don’t think you have to stick to those boring grey ones you see on supermarket shopping trollies!

Create a length of work space with underneath storage

Or, how about creating a bespoke desk? Rather than buying endless flat-pack desks to fix together, why not run a desk space along the edge of the wall that stretches the length of the room? All you need to do is get some old metal paper organisers (or any filing cabinet), make sure each is the same height (and not too high to work at), and then lay a piece of wood across the top.

Secure the wood in place against the wall, cutting out a hole and sanding down the rough edges to allow computer cables to pass discreetly to the floor. Hey presto… you have copious amounts of workspace to put laptops and computers on, and the dividers between each workstation double up as storage spaces for all your office bits and bobs. You can also make desks in the same way to fill up the centre of the room, fixing the wood to the drawers below rather than fixing it to the wall.