Office Pegboard Organization

Office Pegboard Organization

To create an office pegboard organization system, we painted and installed a pegboard on a wall in our office to add additional storage.

Even though we pretty much took it easy during the long holiday weekend we did manage to squeeze in a simple DIY organization project for our home office on Sunday. I am pleased with how it turned out. It is always a great outcome when a project solves both a visual and a functional problem. We painted and installed a pegboard on a wall in our office to add additional storage.

During the day I run a small web design & development company out of our office. I spend a lot of time in this room and I’ve learned that staying organized is crucial to running a small business out of the home. Without an organizational system in place, it is extremely easy for personal mail to get lumped in with client invoices and before you know it you have a mountain of all different kinds of paperwork mixed together sitting on your desk. I’m writing from experience. Sometimes I feel like I am playing a game of Jenga. Every time I throw another paper on the stack, I just wait for it to come crashing down all over the floor. And of course when you are looking for a specific paper, you can never find it.

I am the type of person who loves to be organized but can only stay organized if I have a designated place to put everything. If not, no matter how many times I straighten things up, the paper mountain returns or just moves to a different location. I had been on the lookout for a solution to keeping all of the paperwork associated with my current projects organized as well as readily available to grab each morning when I sit down to work.

I have tried several methods for organizing my current web design projects so I can easily keep all the associated mockups, invoices, client information, etc. in one location as well as visibly display the phase each project is in. For awhile I had a dry erase board with my current schedule and kept all the in-progress client folders in a file rack. This situation was not ideal because visually the dry erase board did not fill up the wall and the top of the file cabinet felt cluttered.

Office Pegboard Organization Wall

We had two small pieces of pegboard left over from our storage wall project in the garage (we will be posting that project soon) which gave me an idea for the office. I saw several examples of incorporating pegboards in offices and wanted to give it a try. Since we didn’t have enough for one large pegboard, we cut the two left over pieces so they were the exact size.

Then we sanded them down and I painted them SW Gauntlet Gray, which is a shade darker than the wall color in our office (SW Dovetail). Finally, we hung the pegboards up. It was our visual preference to leave a little bit of space between the two boards. We put small blocks of wood behind the areas where we planned on hanging clipboards and drilled into the wall through the wood so that the pegboard would appear as if it was floating off the wall and we could put metal hooks in it to hang the clipboards.

Another part of this project was to spruce up some old clipboards we had lying around. We wrapped all the areas we did not want to paint with brown masking paper. A roll of non-adhesive craft paper is super cheap at hardware stores and comes in handy for a lot of our projects.

We spray painted just the front metal clip to add a bit of color and to make the clipboards pop against the gray pegboard.

For each client I put all the associated paperwork in a folder and then attached it to a clipboard. I ran several post-it notes through the printer with each phase of my design process. The color represents the phase of the project and I can easily remove and stick a new note once the the project moves into the next phase.

Not only does the office pegboard organization make for a colorful display, I can easily see where each of my project stands and grab the one I need to work on that day off my project board. I ordered them so the new projects are at the top and the ones with the closest launch date are on the bottom. Once a project is complete, I will file it away in my file cabinet below and a clipboard opens up for a new project to begin!

This DIY home office project was easy, quick to put together and actually only cost us one can of green spray paint since all the other supplies we used were left over from other projects. I really like how visually the whole wall is filled up now and the space feels much more complete than it did before with this office pegboard organization solution.

I believe the office pegboard organization system will work really well for keeping all my projects organized. Now the paper mountain will be more of a paper hill while I move on to figuring out a good solution for sorting the mail more efficiently.

Original article and pictures take studiograyhouse.com site