Office Update

So things are progressing slow and steady with the Big Move project.  Yesterday after a lot of debate we finally hung some drapes in the new office.  I also want to mention that I LOVE our new office space.  Here's what it looked like before:

I had been looking for the perfect fabric for weeks now.  I loved this:

and had the sample tacked up on the window.  I love these colors.  It's so fresh looking.  But I am a cheapskate at heart and couldn't see spending the money when there are so many other projects that need our attention (and cash!!) Then I remembered some Ikea Henny panels that were unused from a previous project.

I'm not going to lie.  There were some tears shed and some very bad words uttered much louder than a whisper when I tried to install the new (cheap) rods.  I thought I was destroying our freshly painted walls.  My Sweet Husband stepped in and saved the day (and our walls!) with the proper tools and a little more patience than I possess.  It's to him that I owe this project checked off the list. 

These Henny drapes would not have been my first choice but they are fresh and light and a little fun too. 

Rosie loves the new digs too.  Check her out in her supervisors position under the desk!  I'm super happy to have this crossed off the list.  Now on to the next project!

In Progress: Our Office Is Starting to Come Together

I said come back tomorrow and by tomorrow I meant a week later!  The office still has a long way to go but here's a look at where we are now.  We have a place to sit which is amazing progress for us.

 It's so nice that everyone has his or her place.  Having lots of storage and more ways to keep myself organized is great.  I tend to have piles of things about me so I'm looking forward to using these handy dandy labeled storage boxes to keep my clutter in check.

My Great Grandmother's dresser (also my changing table as a baby) fits perfectly into the dormer to house my GINORMOUS printer.  We also managed to get a few things hung on the wall to make it feel more like a finished room.  

We still have quite a few things left on the to-do list:

• finish organizing the shelving
• install a new closet system and move the file cabinets from the old office (downstairs) into the new, highly functional, closet. 
• find new knobs for the closet doors and maybe paint them black.  I LOVE black doors but I'm also digging the seamless all-white look of that wall.  What do you think? Paint them black or leave them white?
• make a decision about window treatments.  I have a swatch or too but I haven't seriously started the hunt for fabric yet.  I keep hoping a magical deal will fall into my lap.
• find a rug - I've already started looking and I like this one, but I'm not quite ready to commit
• find a new work table - we're using a drop leaf table that belonged to the Husband's grandfather but it's not quite big enough.  It will work though until I stumble across one that will be perfect.  I can be patient.

So we've been able to take the room from this

to this

We've still got a ways to go but I am very excited about the journey!

Moving: working on a room to work in

As you may recall, in an effort to make our home more functional for us, the Husband and I have been working on a plan to re-arrange half the rooms in our house (you can get the details here.)  We still have a lot of work to do but I thought it was time for an update.  I'll start with the new office.

 Here's a peak at the room from the hall when it was still partially the music room.  The Husband's workbench was still assembled and the picture of Louis was still hanging on the wall.

Things were still being boxed up and instruments were still being carried down stairs.  The drop leaf table had just been added to the room to function as our temporary desk.
The next task was to give everything a nice coat of fresh white paint.  But first I had to remove glue spots from the ceiling where stars had once been stuck by the previous owners.  Here's an up close few of what I was working with:

After a little google search I came up with a couple of remedies that I thought I would try.  First up, Goo Gone.  That stuff takes off anything sticky.....or maybe not.  Next, Murphy's Oil Soap.  Even with a lot of elbow grease it still wasn't working.  I had  also read something about heating a putty knife with a hair dryer and scraping it off.  I wasn't quite up for that so I decided to try a few more things.  Magic Eraser came next and failed like the rest.  Then I called in the big guns, I called my Mom!  She is amazing and knows how to solve problems so after some discussion about my options I finally decided to try acetone (nail polish remover).  Winner, winner, chicken dinner!!  It actually worked.  It also took the paint off but that was okay because I would be repainting too.  It worked best when I used a cotton ball - just like I was removing polish from my toes.  I was so happy!!  Now, we could really start painting.

  
We also finished up the hall which was WAY overdue.  It's a soft gray (Gliddon Ruffled Feathers) like the living room and stairs.  In our family the Husband is the roller and I'm the trimmer/cutter-inner.  It makes for quicker work when you know your job. 

I thought a lot about what shade of white to paint the office.  (I know that sounds ridiculous.) I wanted it to be white because I work with color all the time and it's so nice to be surrounded by something clean and neutral that isn't competing with the project at hand.  I also wanted white because the room has lots of angles and weird ceilings.  It's nice to have everything painted out so that everything looks less cluttered.  Benjamin Moore's White Dove (OC-17) is my all-time favorite go-to white but it was a lot easier just to send the Husband around the corner to the Home Depot to pick up a few gallons.  I could have had them color match it for me but in the end we were lured by a name, Martha Stewart's Popcorn (in honor of my in-law's dog).  It turned out to be a really great clean white.

 

We then assembled the giant stack of boxes that became our new Epedit shelving.  I can't tell you how excited this made me.  This is when the room really started to look like our new office. 

Here's a little tease.  Come back tomorrow and I'll show you what it looks like!

We're Moving!

 Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles via Blueprint Bliss

Well, sort of....Several weeks ago the Husband and I were talking about the house which led to a conversation about our dream house.   But talking about the future "perfect" house let us talk about ways we could achieve some of those goals with the home that we already have. Though it's not perfect, the house we have now is ours and I don't think we'll be going anywhere any time soon.  After a lot of thought I came up with a plan to rearrange half the rooms in the house (I even drew up plans because I'm that kind of dork!) and spent the next couple of weeks trying not to overwhelm my Sweet Husband with all the work that lay before us. 

Check out this graphic I made to help demonstrate the plan:

We are moving the music room downstairs so that the Husband doesn't have to lug his bass up and down the stairs on an almost daily basis when he has a gig.  The rarely used guest room is moving into our tiny shared office because something that is only used 2 or 3 times a year should not be taking up that much real estate.  And finally, the office is moving upstairs into the old music room spot for more space and happily more sunlight (yay!) 
The other brilliant part of this plan is that these rooms hadn't really ever been finished, meaning that we hadn't already spent a lot of time and money to make them functional as well as fashionable.  As I have mentioned on many occasions here on the blog, I wanted to install shelving in the office and have somehow managed to do that for more than a year now.  I had even taken the step of buying shelf brackets last month but I just couldn't seem to finish the job.  Now I know that I was just waiting for the perfect plan to come along! 
We'll be living in a bit of chaos for awhile but I'm really excited about how everything is working out. 

Office Inspiration

As I've mentioned before, I need new shelves on the wall over my desk in the office.  We haven't gotten to it on the to do list let.  (to his credit the Husband has been working extremely hard on the yard for the last several weeks) My hope is that we will have them by the end of the year.  Maybe.

While we continue to work on that I will continue to dream about what it could be.  One of my favorite pictures is of this one I've had tacked to my inpiration board for ages.

 
It is from an old issue of Martha Stewart Living from YEARS ago.  (notice the dinosaur of a laptop on the desk - it's listed as a IBM ThinkPad 755 CD laptop computer)  Though I don't think those awesome cubbies are in my near future I love how each square gives the opportunity for storage as well as creating some artful vignettes.  I love the chair and its fabric, the minimal color, and the rustic table as desk too.  Try to ignore the whack-a-doodle placement of the file cabinet trapped behind the table leg though.  Also from a styling perspective I find it interesting that they didn't edit out the wall plug and outlet in the lower right corner.  It's something you never see in magazines anymore yet it's something we live with everyday and really can't live without.  It always makes me happy we things look a little more real, more human, more lived in.

 

Procrastination Prevention: a reveal and the next thing on my list

As an update to my previous post about my (unfinished) gallery wall I wanted to redeem myself to say that I did it!!  I finally framed and hung those last few pieces.

Woo Hoo!!

Since shame and public humiliation seems to be the thing that works for me I'm going to move on to the next thing on the list - my office. The Husband and I actually share an office.  It's a small space but seems to be working in that we each have our own area to work and our stuff is there.  It's not pretty.  It's kind of a wreck actually.  When we got married almost two years ago I moved into the Husband's house full of stuff with my own house full of stuff.  It was a lot of stuff for a not so big house.  We both purged A LOT of things and we were still left with piles-o-things.  The way we handled it was to make every other room in the house livable but pile everything "extra" into either the office or the guest room.  For a long while you couldn't even see the floor in here.  It's taken a long time but you can now see (most? some?) of the floor.

What I want to focus on today though is the wall over my desk.  It's screaming out for some shelves.  Shelves would be so nice and go a long way to help us both manage our clutter and the piles-o-stuff that seem to be always sitting around.

my side of the desk

 the Husband's side of the desk

That's my dream anyway.  It's been the plan to install those shelves since almost the day I officially moved in.  I had the work counters installed almost immediately when we got married.  The shelves were to be installed next.  I could never make up my mind though about what kind of support brackets to use.  I could never manage to get to the lumbar yard to buy the shelving material.  Blah, blah, two years.  Two Years, people!!  Now that I have put my secret shame out there I hope that this all will quickly resolve itself.  Shame me at will.  I need the motivation.

Anyone else hungry for a banana?