Office Update!

It's finally happening! After 7 months of living in our new house I am FINALLY getting around to decorating it and "pimping" it out. I know, I'm probably too old to use that term but that's all I got! Haha!

Once again, I took to Pinterest for inspiration. I've never had a home office, so I didn't know what I wanted. I did know 2 things- 1. We're broke so it needed to be cheap and 2. It needed to be a place that I can escape to and be my creative outlet. We are still working on the room as a whole, but I wanted to share some of the progress that was made.

First things first, PAINT! This was another thing I debated a lot about... Here is the room before we bought it, during our 1st walk through:

This is the only room in the whole house that has this cork-board flooring. It isn't what I would pick for myself, but I decided to keep it since I knew I wanted to use this room as my office and I paint a lot. This flooring is perfect for wiping up paint, so for now it's staying.

When we first moved in I had planned to do a chevron pattern on that main wall, but I didn't realize how thick the texturing was on it, so that plan go squashed. Unfortunately, I had painted the other 3 walls a lilac before I realized that, so this room lived like this for a while:

 

It gets a TON of natural light since we haven't put up curtains yet so I decided to go a bit bold with the color scheme...

Pink Salmon by Glidden in Satin Finish

 

Blue Grey Slate by Glidden in Satin Finish

 

 

I wanted something girly but something that could also transition if someone ever needed to use it for a bedroom down the line. I am obsessed with grey and although it looks dark in this picture, it's not such a shock in person. (Probably all that glorious natural light) My true inspiration actually came from Averie's party decorations. I had picked this watermelon-esq color for the long wall and painted it about a month ago. I was storing all my craft supplies in there and when I saw these boxes from Averie's party next to the wall it inspired me to go for grey.

I do have a couple tips for painting multi-colored textured walls. I've have been doing it my whole life since my love of multi-colored walls is not a new thing. (When i was a teenager my room was 4 different shades of purple). The fist thing for a textured wall- skip the painters tape. Seriously. It's not going to stick in a straight line anyway, so you might as well hold off on that cup of coffee and just eyeball it. Since textured walls don't have a smooth line from ceiling to wall, it'll look cleaner if you just drag and angled brush across it.

 

 

My other tip for doing the corners is to over paint the lighter color where they'll meet. This way, when you go to paint the darker color you won't risk having the previous color poking through where you might have missed a spot. There is literally nothing worse while painting then thinking you're done, seeing a bunch of missed spots, going to fix it, and then splotching the wrong color on the wrong wall. I used a 1" angled brush that I use when painting with acrylic to do the corner with the darker color. It doesn't take up that much time, it's faster than taping it off and using a larger brush. Promise.

 

The coolest thing that I didn't anticipate is how these 2 colors would make the existing cork floor pop. Here's a little before and after action so you can see what a difference it made:

Let's hear it for happy accidents! Haha! Here's the whole room, along with my amazing carpet that I scored at Target during their Spring sale!

I also love that my lamp that I've had for years works with both of these colors... not that I need any more light in this room haha!

The room was only left like this for about a week before I decided to put my husband to work in the name of a mother's day present: a huge custom made craft desk! This room is super awkward to shoot because it's sort of L shaped and it's really long. I wanted a nice big table to be able to lay out fabrics and paints ect. After showing him some pictures on Pinterest, he drew up this bad boy:

 

My table was going to be 56" wide and 48" long. That would still leave about 36" from the end of the table to the side of the closet. Not sure if that stick figure is supposed to be me, or him building it, but I can assure you when I sit at my desk, I don't make that face haha! The table is made from a couple sheets of the nicer- more fine- plywood and a Walmart shelf. In total, the supplies cost about $80 which is a far cry from the $1200 price I got from a carpenter. As far as how my husband crafted it, I have no idea! I was inside enjoying my mothers day ;) Here he is making sure my sewing machine fit into the nook:

 

We decided I didn't need the smaller cubbies in lew of my sewing machine having a nice, snug home. Here is the finished product (pre-white paint). Is it ok to be in love with inanimate objects? He even cut out 2 round holes on the top so I could stick my cords through instead of having them hang off the sides. One on each side, ya know... in case I want to have a buddy come sew with me! Since this photo I've painted it white and put a clear coat  sealer on the top. It looks the same so I didn't take a photo (since there are hardly any in this post haha!)

One more quick project I'd like to share is a custom photo holder I made for my office. I decided I wanted to use a robins egg blue as an accent color. (Besides all the white I plan to use to balance out the dark grey). It's pretty simple so I'll let the pictures do most of the talking:

 

 

 Taaa daaa!!!!

For the supplies, I found this frame (already painted- how lucky was that!) at an antique store for $15 and I already had the twine. For the little clothes pins- those are scrapbook accents from Target for $2 and the Washi tape was $3.99 (but I can use it for a lot of different things).

I'll keep updating as we finish projects in here, and we are due for a kitchen remodel update too! For now, I'll leave you with this closeup of the washi tape covered clothes pin and my favorite picture of Averie to date. Happy crafting!