Building the Ultimate Home Office Makeover 2026

This is my home office and this is where all the magic happens. From video editing to thumbnail design and project planning. But it's incredibly difficult to be creative and productive in a room that's cluttered, bland, and really kind of boring. Well, today we're on a mission to make the most epic home office setup you could possibly ever imagine that'll even make Batman jealous. First things first, let's get ourselves a clean slate. Can never have too many tripods. Oh, check this out. This is my first home office on the few houses back. This is crazy. I thought this used to be the coolest office I've ever had. This is not at all. That's not it at all, folks. It's going to be epic. I'm telling you, it's going to be something that I'm never going to want to leave. So, a little backstory here is a few houses ago that we had, I was a fixer upper. I did all these crazy transformation and then I got reached out by better homes and garden uh one of their magazines and they were like, "Hey, can we feature it?" And so you see all these cool different spots of the projects in the house. If you're fan of the channel long enough, you remember these stairs that I did, uh some of the outdoor painting stuff that I did, an office setup, a kitchen transformation. It was just a really cool time. And it's nice to have a little piece of memory of that that was published in a magazine. Oh, and by the way, this is my new giant 3D printer. I recently got into 3D printing, and if you guys are into them as well, let me know in the comment section cuz I'm obsessed with it right now. I don't know how well this is going to hold up. I should take it apart. These desks look pretty unique. Was there any story behind them? >> Yeah. So, my in-laws, they uh built this house 10, 11 years ago. And my mother-in-law, she had a sewing room here. And so, these cabinets are the same kitchen cabinets that are in the kitchen, match them exactly. And because my father-in-law does granite countertops here in Boisee, uh he just custom cut all these cabinets or countertops and position them on top of the cabinets, making his own really cool sewing room. In fact, they've put outlets inside these cabinets, which makes it really convenient for sewing equipment. But I didn't know about it. So now I'm discovering four outlets that are behind this cabinet. They've since retired Florida, so uh we get to kind of make this our new home. All right, so let's plan everything that we want in here. I asked our private community, the Builder's Lodge, uh what they would do for their dream office setup. And we got acoustic panels, Cat 9 cable for internet. Uh we have dark moody uh color schemes, accent lighting. We got ergonomic chairs, a table or a desk that also can be motorized standing or sitting just for more productive workflow. A lot of cool ideas. So, for me, what I'm thinking is that maybe being the main wall and then we'll have our live edge slab which would look so sick around the thing. Possibly two tiers to it. So, the monitor could be here and then, you know, you have all of your equipment like soundboards below. Uh, this thing will rise. I want some really cool almost like accent lighting down below. Nothing too flashy. Lots of shelving on top. And then between all the shelves, we would put all these acoustic panels to prevent any kind of reverb. Possibly even stretching it around into a 90 to fill in this wall. And then this would be like a backdrop. So when you're doing Zoom calls, Skypes, anything like that, you'll have a cool aesthetic look behind you that has similar layout. That's what I'm thinking so far. It's in my head. I know the feel that I want for it. But first things first, let's do the color. I have never been more confident in my life about a particular color. Iron ore. I've done this color in the movie theater video that I did. That color is absolutely phenomenal. Great. Great light, great in bad light. It's just great all around. Going to hit this puppy up. This entire room is going to get super dark. And I think it's going to even match these doors pretty well. Going to get my supplies and start rolling away, baby. Let's get to it. If Bamman wanted to paint an office, I think this is the color. Iron ore has saved the day. Once again, the only different I did is instead of doing m flat like I did in the movie theater, I went with a mat, which doesn't feel like a chalkboard, which is absolutely perfect, and it doesn't have that crazy sheen. Now that this is done, we need to start laying out, well, I'll call it the mood. And here's what I'm thinking. All right, one thing for sure is I know we're going to have a big wraparound desk situation here, but for the mood, I need a ton of LED lighting for accents cuz this is not going to be its natural light. We got something special in store. So, first thing I'm going to do is uh we'll kind of get creative. I'm going to start taking some blue tape, running it around to see where I need all my shelving to be because underneath all those shelves, which I think if I did my math right, it's going to be like 18 shelves total in here. They're all going to have LEDs underneath. So, grab the old blue painters tape because your boy is uh a visual learner, if you will, and uh start laying it out. Once I finalize, we'll start cutting into holes, feeding some wire. Let's get into it. This is cool, right? I got them all staggered all the way to the top. But then we have this. And then we have this. Yes, [sighs] I told you I'm a real problem, but we're going to do it. I got my fish tape. I have my 18 gauge wire. I think I'm going to break it down into like three or four different drivers. Uh, punch a hole there. Use that power source. Run this section of the wall. Do the same here. Run it up there. Do one there and then one on this back wall. And if you're thinking, "Well, dummy, why did you already paint it? If you're going to have to cut holes in a drywall, well, cuz I needed like a day to process how I'm going to lay this all out." And I decided to, well, instead of wasting time, let's just at least start painting. Touch-ups are going to be easier. So, that's how I'm thinking. I'm real a real problem. So, this is how I'm going to do it. All right. So, for the shelving, because we our family got hit with a crazy flu-l like thing over the weekend, the way I spent my Sunday evening was prepping for today, the shelves situation. And the situation that I came up with is simply using plywood. However, plywood's so thin, I said, "Hey, why not just stack it?" So, we have glued up two sheets of 3/4-in plywood. We're sitting at what, inch and a half there. So, those are going to be nice, girthy shelves. [music] I got some pretty slick brackets that I bought on Amazon. Whoops. Um, but we'll get to it once we get there. In the meantime, we need to start ripping these puppies down to about 10 in in width. And hopefully I have enough sheets here that we can accomplish an entire buttload of floating shelves today. >> [snorts] [groaning] >> That's going to leave a mark. Look at these beautiful shelves. Now, we have to do a couple of things because they're going to have LEDs running underneath them. I don't want them to be sticking out like glued on, and it's just going to be a half-ass job. Instead, we're going to have channels running through these uh uh floating shelves. And uh to make it a little bit more complicated for me, cuz that's what we like to do here on the channel is make my life harder, is we're going to have to recess these channels. They look like they're not far in. Uh we're only going to need about I don't know that looks like about an uh 3/8 38 of an inch. I got my router right here, but what I don't have is one of those fancy attachment things to a track saw. So, I'm going to do the old school way where I'm just going to take one of the shelves, clamp it down, and use that as a guide. And then rinse and repeat. And hopefully we get this thing looking pretty sharp. >> Absolutely perfect. Now we just got to do a billion more of these. We got perfect channels. Absolutely perfect. Now, the way we're going to install these is [music] with these Amazon slide on hardware kits. Um, you essentially borrow a hole that's half an inch thick and just slide the puppy on however you do install these onto the studs. Uh, I don't know how I feel about them just because these are too far apart. So, you'd have to put the screws at an angle in order to catch the stud. But, we'll solve that problem once we get there. And guess what? We're going to get there right now. So, I think the best method to do it is install the brackets first. Make sure they're all on the same plane, nice and straight, then hold this up and see exactly where the measurements need to take place. We'll come in here and try Well, we'll try our absolute hardest to make the hole straight. But, um, I don't have any guides, so it's a great way to start a Monday. >> [music] >> I was 100% right. There's no way you can get both screws into the stud, which is a terrible design. Why would you do that? Uh instead, uh they were kind enough to include some anchors, which that's not what is that going to do? So, I just threw up as many as I could up there. One is in the stud, one is in the anchor. The nice [music] thing is they're not going to hold crazy books or anything. just a lot of cool decorative stuff. [snorts] But um I'm not too thrilled about it. However, I feel a little bit okay cuz that corner is going to hold it just fine. We can reinforce it. Once we slap it on, we'll really see whether or not this puppy needs some welding or fabricating or something like that. Here's my strategy to drill a straight uh hole here. I saw somebody do this one time. They put like a washer. I don't have one, but this is close enough. And the idea is here is as you're drilling sideways, you can't really do it this way cuz it's going to fall. But the idea is uh if you're caned down, this will go down. And if you're caned up, that little O-ring will start sliding back. So the idea is you want to keep it right in the middle there. And that might be an indicator that you got a nice leveled hole. But we'll see. I don't know. We'll try it. What's the worst that can happen? Well, it doesn't work. [snorts] >> I'll be honest, I don't know if this is working that well. I think if I had a bigger ring here, this would work. But [snorts] I'm going to say screw it. I'm just going to wing it and just eyeball it. It's the best I could do at this point. Moment of truth, kids. Moment of truth. Oh, the suspense is killing me. Oh, snaps. Look at [snorts] that beauty right there. [snorts] Damn. All right, I know we could patch that up, but we got to make sure this doesn't happen again. Maybe I'm going to try next time drilling it downward. Maybe I can have more control. Damn, this sucks. I mean, flimsy, but like I said, I think I can put like an L bracket here so it'll solidify it a little bit. All in all, not terrible. The drywall also is doing this like concave thing. But I think we could I think we can work with this for sure. For sure. Well, we'll have to work with this. There's no other option. >> Don't you have to stain them before you put them on the wall? >> Uh, ideally, yeah. Uh, there's no way I'm taking that one off. That thing is on there snug as a bug. But now that you mentioned it, I think I will once I drill these holes really quickly stain it. I don't have to give it too much time to cure. I'll just wear some black gloves, put them on, and then that way it'll save me a whole lot of trouble later on cuz this will be a pain in the butt. I'm going to get stain on this paint, the whole thing. It's going to suck. So, good point, Kyle. Good point. I guess eyeballing worked. Nothing blew out. Let's just hope it fits fine. I'm pretty confident it is. But yeah. And the second thing is the advertisement for the Amazon link were like how to install. Simply use our guide or simply use a guide to bore through. Where's the guide? It didn't come with a stupid package. false advertisement, but they were pretty cheap. That was nice. So, I was contemplating what color to go with uh just cuz I want the desk to be oak. It's not oak. What am I doing? I'm smoking crack. Uh well, sawdust. Actually, I'm smoking sawdust here. [snorts] It's going to be walnut. So, then I was like, "Okay, well, if would we stain it the same color? Would we just paint them black? Black would have been cool, but there's the a lot of black going on over there already. So, I think what I'm going to do is go with dark walnut on this birch um plywood. And the nice thing is the faces of this ply, they sell at Home Depot 1x3 uh trim. So, I could actually install that on with some brad nails and glue and it'll look really slick. Not to mention, it's going to be dark. So, I I needed to have some form of texture, but not, you know, obnoxious. Oh, yeah. This is the color. I dig it. I dig it a lot. Can you dig it? I just dropped my drill and it fell right on this head. Bent the snot out of it. Maybe I can use to make pancakes in the morning for the kids. Tiny little pancakes. So, I definitely spoke way too soon u about the whole sickness thing cuz the next day after I said, "Oh, everybody's sick at home." I got hit with the wildest sickness I've had in a long time. It felt like the pengalin and the bat were back at it together. That's a co joke in case you missed it. But I'm back at it. Not feeling great, but nothing like putting 20 different floating shelves up. This is looking great. I like them how I'm staggering this. I'm going to have a cabinet below here. Uh, I intentionally didn't put another shelf here cuz there's going to be a big lamp. That'll be cool. Look at me being a designer. But I need to go pick up some walnut. What we're going to do is we're going to wrap the front of these. I think Home Depot carries them already so you don't have to mill them or PL them. And hopefully my walnut stain will match the real walnut trim perfectly. So, let me go grab that real quick. Throw some brad nails in. And then that should give us enough time to start working on the lighting aspect. I don't know which part I'm going to hate more, uh, building the shelves or running the electrical form, but we'll find out out right now. So, what we're working with is, uh, a bunch of LEDs, and I went with these fancier ones where it's more of a uniform strip. It glows easier as opposed to patches individually. However, like I said, we do have our diffusers and channels that will help mitigate any of that kind of uneven uneven light, I guess. But the [snorts] hooking up of the electrical, what I found online is these little transition clips. And in my brain, it sounds pretty simple, but we'll see how it goes. So, these just apparently you're supposed you can just cut these strips, feed it through here. There's two little screws. Press this together plus and minus. And then, uh, the wires that we already ran, they were 18 gauge. So based on my calculation, it's sufficient enough to carry the power cuz it'll get, you know, less and less dim [music] um as uh or more dim, I guess, as you go on the further with these strands. But you do need what's called a driver. And this is essentially power conversion from 120 volt that's coming out of your wall and bring it down to only 24 volts for the LEDs or 12 volts depending on the size you went with. But I did my calculations. I think I got everything right. In order to keep it the most safe and keep it the most amount of light from it, we're going to do, I think, three drivers. One for that strand, one for this wall, and then one for the the back accent wall. Uh, I think we got everything here, but we're going to find out if we screwed up on something. Well, we got some good news. It works. The driver is working great. I'm just borrowing power temporarily. We'll feed it [music] all through. We'll be fine. Uh, now the whole game is going to be making sure that as we're piggybacking off of each one. We're not losing anything. But this thing is, look how nice and beautiful that is. You almost don't need a diffuser. Part of me almost thinks like I shouldn't have even bought the channel, [music] but we'll do it right the first way. Onward and forward. Well, we just learned something new today. Uh, not all LED strips are the same or created the same. Uh, this is an 8 mm and this is a I think a 10 mm. And that's why I caught it cuz [music] the 10 mm is not sliding into this 8 mm connector. Pretty fun to figure that out in the middle of a project. So, now I fortunately I have more, but it's not enough to get the whole job done. We'll have to figure out how to get either different connectors or modify this strip to be able to fit 8 mm. But learn something new every day, huh? right. Well, I think I cross all my tees and dot my eyes. My only concern is whenever you do so much at once, you don't if something doesn't work, you kind of takes a while to figure out where the problem was. But, uh, let's just do some cowboy like we always do. I think it'll be fine. Let me hit the breaker, turn the lights on, see how it goes. Holy [snorts and laughter] That's freaking incredible, dude. Wow, dude. I love everything about it. The channels were clutch. The color temperature perfect. 3,000 Kelvin. That's what we went with. It's warm, but it's not like super super warm. Uh, dude, this is incredible. It's got so much lighting. I mean, if even if you turn off this Oh, this is what this is what I wanted. I wanted no lights turned on. And what's cool about this setup is uh these are also dimable. That's you have to get a specific driver for it. And on top of it, because I didn't want to cut holes in the wall to put a new light switch, they have these rocker switches that are like wirelessly connected. So, all I have to do is put a little receiver on both the drivers and mount these suckers here and I can control this with a light switch. This is so sick, dude. I just want to sit here and ood in it for a while, but I got to get done. Lights are done. Let's start talking about cabinets. Uh, going to do minimalistic look cuz I really want this whole stretched out desk feel, but we need something to support the countertops, especially in that like angled V thing. These are the cabinets that were here. They're great cabinets. We're going to paint them. I'm going to paint them the same color as the walls, except the sheen is going to be different. Instead of being matte, these are going to be satin usually like any good cabinet should be just for the protective measurements. We'll get this stuff masked off, spray it. I'll actually show you the product that I my go-to for cabinet paint. Uh not a sponsor, but pretty damn good quality paint. Trust me on this one. This is from Sheron Williams. Emerald specifically for cabinets. Uh I think it's a urethane alid. And how my dumb brain understands it when they were teaching me this is uh you know there's water-based paints and there's oil based paints but with this stuff apparently it's uh an oil based product that's surrounded with uh I don't know the molecule is surrounded with waterbased and so when you spray it it applies like any kind of water-based paint you can dilute with water but then once it starts curing all the water molecules dissolve and you're left with a very durable oil grade paint. That's the way that was explained to it. I might be wrong, but I've used it on dozens of cabinets and [music] boy, it's my favorite so far. The most durable I've found. Got to hit it up. Satin sheen. Make a little contrast from the walls. Give it a protective measurement. Couple of coats. So, we had quite the adventure painting these last night to get them ready for today. And the reason it was an adventure cuz my dumb brain completely well being sick. That's…