My office,which we’re making over, is an odd little room. It is by far the smallest of our bedrooms. It has a weird floorplan. And it’s also apparently haunted. Yup. You read that right.
Here is a floorplan that is mostly to scale. Note the off-centre window and light. The weird little niche just inside the door. The pocket door that leads into our bedroom (which comes in handy as the switch for the second light is in our bedroom).
When we scraped the ceiling, we uncovered evidence of earlier walls, and Matt came up with the best explanation I’ve heard so far to explain the odd layout.
It appears that at one time the room was divided roughly in two. Matt’s theory is that half the room served as a large pantry for the kitchen, and the other half was a big walk-in closet off the bedroom. (You can kind of see the lines on the ceiling around the dangling light bulb).
The closet theory explains why there are three full-length mirrors in this one little room–even the pocket door is mirrored. As dated as the mirrors are, they come in handy when I’m sewing and want to see how things fit, so they will be staying.
I’m doing my best to make the layout work for me. You may remember that our long term plan is for this room to become the foyer when we relocate the front door to the house. So I don’t want to do any major renovations that will be ripped out down the road.
I think I’ve come up with a furniture plan that will work.
I figured out how to make use of the tiny niche a few years ago when I set it up as a command centre with a tall narrow dresser, bulletin board and our calendar.
Beside the pocket door, there’s a track light on the ceiling. This makes that wall the best location for my desk.
I bought the china cabinet specifically because it was the exact dimensions to fit on the wide side of the window. The cabinet could also go just inside the door (where our filing cabinet is currently located). However, I feel like a tall piece of furniture might crowd the entryway too much.
I’m hoping that all of the changes will exorcise the ghost in the office.
When we were scraping the ceiling, the room got a little humid. The words “Raven Room” appeared in the steam on the window.
So very, very odd.
Do you have an odd room at your house? How about a haunted room? How would you lay out the furniture in this room?
Home on 129 Acres 
Very interesting! Several spaces here have been reconfigured over the years. Most of the changes had to do with exterior porches, but we think the three bedrooms in a row upstairs might have just been one long bunk room, originally.
That ghost writing is creepy!
I think if any house has a ghost it should be BHH! With the history of your house, it seems likely. Have you had any odd happenings?
People ask me about ghosts quite often. I’m not a believer but… 🙂 I’m planning a podcast about old houses and unexplained activity. Many people are convinced their old houses have ghosts.
There are those unexplainable moments.
Your layout looks really good. I think you have made the best use of the space.
This may sound silly but I always wanted a ghost in my house. I wanted a nice ghost, more like Casper. Well, after I had lived at the last house for a few years I had some things happen that I just couldn’t explain. No logic or basic knowledge of physics could excuse some of the things. So I said that I had a ghost. I would write about it to my friends of Facebook and they would really get excited hearing about the new strange thing that was happening.
Then I decided to sell my house. I decided that I better stop discussing the “ghost” just in case the prospective buyers didn’t take it as well. Part of me says that it is all silly and of course there is no ghost, and then part of me says, “well…maybe?”.
Thanks for your feedback on the layout, Sarah.
When we were first buying the farm, we connected with a friend of a friend who had boarded her horse at the farm. She shared all kinds of info with us and then out of the blue said, “And there’s a ghost that lives under the stairs in the barn.” Ummm… okay. Not exactly what we expected to hear. It didn’t dissuade us from buying the farm, and we’ve met the ghost yet.
….weeeiiiirrrddd…..that is just bizarre. Even the way the writing is sort of dripping down is creepy.
I like your layout. The only thing I might do, and of course that is without seeing the space, is move the file cabinet a little bit in from the door so as to create a sense of breathing room in the entryway. But again, not having actually been in it, that may not be necessary or right for that space.
We once tried to scare and fascinate my older two kids and their friends, who were having a big Halloween party that included our crawl space. They were in the 10-12 age range, which is perfect for a bit of a scary tale. We invented this story about a baby that was buried in the crawl space under an “X”, and just kind of hinted at it, didn’t spell it out. Beforehand we had spray painted the X in a corner of the crawl space and made it look all faded. The kids reacted just as we had hoped to the story. But quite awhile later, my seven year old was playing with his friend in the basement and I overheard them talking, and he was saying, “No! Don’t go in there!!” and he was clearly genuinely frightened. It turns out he had snuck in to their party when we didn’t know, and really thought there was a dead baby in our crawl space! #terribleparent
That is definitely a #parentfail. Hopefully he’s not scarred for life!
Thanks for the suggestion on the filing cabinet. I felt like it looked a bit blocky on the model. It actually doesn’t feel too imposing in real life. Having a big flat surface just inside the door is handy too as a drop zone… although not the tidiest situation.