The Office: Revealed?

Ok, it is actually revealed, so the question mark isn’t really necessary.

Before we dive into the good stuff, allow me to frame the post with a “before” photo of our office (the only one I remembered to snap before we jumped right in):

It was a very sad state of affairs. I am truly sorry for the bad photo — while it wasn’t much to look at, it wasn’t as depressing (and dark) as the photo makes it out to be. Also, we had already moved some stuff out of the room by the time I remembered to take the picture, so it wasn’t quite as empty as it seems. However, the photo does accurately portray the tiny desk, walls that were a  shade of moss green, and the curtains that were heavy and black (contributing to the darkness in the photo).

Now the fun part. Without further ado… the world premiere of the first (and only) room in our house to be more than 80% finished, the office:

{ Bonus: you can play the “how many dachshunds can you spot?” game while looking through the photos! }

Source List:

• Main “desk” – Home & Planet (consigned from local artisan), ~$400
• Leaning desk & shelf – Crate and Barrel, ~$300 for both
• Leather lounge chair – Ikea, $550
• Dachshund pillow – Naked Decor, $50 (I actually got it from Joss & Main for $30)
• Dachshund “love” print – local artist during our honeymoon in Bath, UK, $30
• Yellow “Mei” garden stool – Joss & Main, ~$90
• Fan, task lamp – Home Goods, ~$25/ea
• Chalkboard file / magazine holder, CB2, $20
• Chartreuse Filing Cabinet, CB2, $150
• Curtains, Ikea, $10/set
• Picasso sketch artwork, Ikea, $40
• Ceiling pendant, Ikea, $40
• Herringbone Rug & herringbone curtain (used as closet door), Urban Outfitters, $80 & $20
• Diplomas, University of Massachusetts & University of Maryland, $$$$$ hundreds of thousands of dollars for all four degrees

I wouldn’t call it “finished”, but probably 95% of the way there. We still need to unpack our books and fill out the shelf a little more, and the large bare wall behind the desk is just asking for some large format artwork. But the transformation still makes me smile every time I go into that room (and I’ve been working from home a lot more often since we finished!). I can’t believe we used to call the old room an “office”, and keep a straight face!

{ Pssst…. the answer to the dachshund “game” is …. 6 (pillow, photograph behind chair, Picasso artwork center sketch, two doxies in the “love” print on leaning desk, and the pen on top of the Domino book)! Somehow almost every single one of our dachshund-related things ended up in the office, and specifically on only one side of the office (I swear it’s not like this all over the house — we’re not those people …. yet). }

The Office: Pulling it Together

After painting the walls “Cape May Cobblestone”, attempting my first-ever wall stencil, and (finally) installing the quarter round needed to complete the baseboard…. we were so.friggin.close to having one room in our house complete! All we needed was to put our stuff back in there. Oh, and bring in a few new things.

I previously showed off our office furniture in my “mood boards” post — we had a sweet chartreuse filing cabinet and rolling “go-cart” desk from CB2. We also had a leaning desk & accompanying shelf from Crate & Barrel to make use of. Other than that, it was a blank slate. We decided to nix the day-bed that was in there, which took up valuable floor space and was never used for anything other than a place to drop off junk (suitcases, bookbags, etc). We also decided to make use of this new-found space with a larger desk (the go-cart one will find a new home in the house, for sure).

Enter our dining-room-table-turned-desk. Or, more accurately, our desk-turned-dining-room-table-turned-desk-again. You saw him in our mood boards, but here’s a quick history:

We got this guy almost a year ago, in the same transaction that netted us our living room sofa (and cost us much $$$), from the awesome local store Home and Planet. He’s a painted barnwood table made by a local artisan, and we originally picked him up hoping to use him as a desk (I have no idea why I’m referring to the table as “him” and not “it”). But when he/it came home with us, we took one look at the table, our not-so-giant-staircase, and the table again, and quickly concluded via eyeballing that he was not fitting up the stairs. At the time we didn’t want to mess with taking the table apart or using a rope to fit him through the window (the necessary technique in getting queen-sized box springs onto the second floor, which I found out after anxiously calling the former homeowner on moving day, demanding to know how he got his box spring upstairs when we clearly couldn’t).

So we took the table and dropped him off in the dining room, moving our actual dining room table (which isn’t too easy on the eyes, anyway) to the basement for storage. And he’s been a dining room table ever since, until the day that I decided to use my Hulk-strength to force him up the stairs to use as a desk.

It turns out our original estimates were correct — we could not fit the table up the stairs. However once I took the table top off, the pieces fit up easily enough. Here’s a cell-phone-photo montage of the process:

Whew…. that was a lot of writing about a single table. But it felt like a long saga, so I wanted to devote proper attention to it. Especially since I did it all myself while Alex was traveling for work. When I sent him a text message photo of the desk in the office he quickly responded with “How did you do that?”(Me: “Brute force”) “No, seriously… how?”

We still needed some other things — a few accessories, a new light, and definitely a cozy reading chair. So we raided the rest of our house (always a good source for stuff), and then hit up Ikea (THE source for stuff).

After much deliberation over what size chair we could actually fit into our office, we settled on the white leather Karlstad chair. We were originally aiming for a Crate & Barrel “chair and a half” in green (which was featured in our “mood board”), but it was a tad too pricey and probably would have been a little oversized for our space. But we love the Karlstad (the photo below was pulled off of Ikea’s website and doesn’t do it justice – it makes the leather look shiny, patent, and cheap, which is not how it looks in real life).

The white leather was a risky choice (over the cheaper fabric options), especially with two dogs (who are generally allowed on furniture). But the size was perfect, and the tufted style looked a lot more sophisticated to us than the non-tufted fabric version. We figured that in the worst-case scenario, we could buy the fabric cover for the same chair in case the leather gets scratched or damaged…. in fact, now that I think about it, we should just preemptively get that now.

We were also seduced by the Ikea MASKROS pendant … which surprised me, because it was actually Alex’s suggestion. We were just “casually looking” for a new ceiling light (“just looking” is usually how I lure Alex into shopping, when in fact I fully intend on picking something out),  knowing that we wanted to replace our functional-but-blah boob light. And the MASKROS is something that I wouldn’t have even considered, since it’s a little too in-your-face for me (for lighting, at least), and I wasn’t sure how it would go with the room. But we got it to try out, since we had a special fondness for it … it was in our wedding house and wedding photos, after all!

Photo by the supremely talented Dan and his partner Sarah @ Chennergy.com

So armed with our new goodies & things collected from around the house … it was time to put our office together!!!

{Pssst…. that was a hint about what’s up next — the office “reveal”!}

Hallway Frame Gallery

So I previously showed off our much-improved-by-a-coat-of-paint hallway: (**Update: I did eventually replace that burned-out bulb…. and of course a week later another burned out)

And also hinted that I went out to create a “gallery wall” of frames. I gathered up all of the random frames I had laying around the house, as well as anything else I thought I could hang up on the wall (including an old vanity Euro-license plate), and voila:

It’s not quite finished yet, but I like where it’s going….

First and foremost, I had to get a mirror up there, because it’s the only full-length mirror in the house. I’m taking the photo from the bedroom, so you can see how it’s actually a useful spot – it helps me check out my outfits before I leave the house looking ridiculous … or more ridiculous than I intend, at least (see my awesomely and obnoxiously bright outfit in this post). But since the mirror was your typical $5 or $10 college-style, back-of-the-door mirror, I wanted to make it feel a little higher quality. So I added some twine (twisting a few strings together, to make it thicker, then staple-gunned it to the frame of the mirror), and hung it from a colorful doorknob that I had lying around (probably from Hobby Lobby or something similar).

The large canvas is one of our wedding photos, printed on (duh) canvas. I like canvas prints, but can never stomach the cost of them. But I happened to check out My Pix 2 Canvas on a day that they were having a “buy a 16″x20″ canvas for $25!” promotion, so I jumped on that. I probably couldn’t buy a plain 16″x20″ canvas for that much, let alone have one printed, so it was an awesome deal. (Note: this isn’t the first time I’ve used their site to order a photo canvas, and I’ve had great experiences each time — I actually got another wedding-photo canvas at the same time as this one).

The awesome license plate is something that Alex picked up on a bachelor party weekend. I used to drive a SmartCar (awesomeness), and while at a car show Alex saw this “Ur Mom” plate and thought it would be extra hilarious on such a tiny little car.

It was. Extra hilarious.

We’ve since retired Truman the Smart Car, but his memory lives on in the license plate on the wall.

I don’t want to zoom in on the people-photographs (since this is, after all, the internet, and the subjects might not all agree to be shown), but here are a few other highlights (they are cell-phone pictures, so I’m sorry for the mediocre quality):

I’m a big photograph person — as in, I like to look at them (I’m not really good at taking them). So I have found that when it comes to frames, I tend to fill them with photos, photos, and more photos. It is only recently that I’ve branched out into the realm of putting things-that-aren’t-photographs (but are still nice to look at) on my wall.

Clockwise from the top left:

1. An awesome print from VOL25’s Etsy shop, customized with our initials.
2. A robot-themed birthday card from my fabulous sister. I love me some robots, and I think he looks extra cool in this floating-glass style frame (is that a real description?). He looks like he’s got his own little house up there on the wall.
3. A photo-turned-postcard from my professional photographer friend, Kristin Thompson. I believe this was a shot from her trip to Bali!
4. A shiny piece of scrapbook paper (shiny!)
5. My “let’s just see how this works” attempt at DIY photo boards. I’d seen a lot of Mod Podge-d faux canvases and boards on Pinterest, etc, and wanted to figure out how they actually looked. So I took some scrap wood & printed a picture of my dogs on regular paper. Other than messing around with the glue for too long (I kept painting over the same area, even when it was partially drying, so I ended up getting a lot of color smearing & bleeding), it turned out looking better than I thought. Having never used Mod Podge before, I must say I was pleasantly surprised / impressed by the finish (my horrible handiwork notwithstanding). If/when I try it again, I’ll put a little more effort into it.

I will definitely be adding more as I go along, and filling in some spaces with smaller things. But for now I think it looks pretty good! Much better than a bare wall, and having the tall ceilings makes the whole scene a little more dramatic and exciting.

Feeling Moody: Office Edition

In perusing various home improvement type blogs (or even wedding blogs, back when I was planning our wedding), I notice a lot of so-called “mood” boards, or inspiration boards. Some people do a really nice job of putting them together, so you can get on board (har! no pun intended) with their vision. But it’s not something I ever thought of doing myself. I just kept it all in the privacy of my own mind. I knew what my own vision was…. sort of. But when I started using Evernote (which I would describe as a cross between Dropbox and Pinterest) for wedding planning, and then eventually moved on to the (in?)famous Pinterest , I realized I was basically already making “mood boards”.

Here is my Pinterest board from my wedding planning:

*Note: the painting in the upper left is actually the one that I had done for my hubby’s groom gift, I pinned it to the board when the fabulous artist featured it on her Etsy store. 

And I didn’t realize that the PowerPoint presentations I was making to sell my husband on my vision for things were junior “mood boards” in their own right. For example, below is a presentation I created to convince him that we should buy these bookcases from Crate and Barrel and these desk / file cabinets from CB2:

Not the my best work ever, but you get the idea. And, surprisingly, it worked — we headed to the CB2 store in NYC to pick up the office furniture that same weekend.

Here’s another slide I made for him (can you sense a theme of how I do my convincing? I was totally that kid who would whip out the poster board for a presentation to my parents on why we should get a dog .. or maybe it’s my MBA “everything must have a slide deck” mentality kicking in). This time I was trying to convince Alex that we should buy another CB2 chartreuse filing cabinet, and use the two to form a base for a homemade desk (because I went insane with jealousy & “I could totally do that”-itis when I saw the homemade 13-ft desk over at Young House Love).

If you’re paying attention to my slides, you’ll notice the office wall color changed between the last two — that’s because we’ve painted it. I’ll post an update about that (and my adventures in wall stenciling) later.

So now, here’s my most recent “mood board” for the office … ta-da! Some of them are actual photos (like the stenciled wall [foreshadowing!] and the desk/table), and some are screenshots of furniture we already bought for the room (such as the filing cabinet) or furniture we’re thinking of buying (the chair-and-a-half). And there are a few other accessories thrown in to liven it up.

I’ll post again once we have the office in a semi-complete state, so we can see how close I came to this vision … I guess it will be pretty good since I already own more than half of the stuff in that board. So…. sweet!

Decor: Art & Photos

So you’ll have to wait until the next post to find out what else I used that mirror-paint on (See Mirrored Windows post). For now I’m going to share the various “art” that I’ve set up in the house so far.

I use the term “art” loosely because, well… it’s mostly photographs. And the one “original” piece of actual “art” I have is made by yours truly … and thus I do not consider it artistic in the least.

What is my artwork? Well, it is actually a practice board that I bought to test out my “antiquing glaze” that I used on the sofa table I painted a while back. I left it sitting around, and one day placed the peacock feather on top, which had been attached to a housewarming gift I received as a decoration on the wrapping. It seemed to look good, so I taped it to the wall. Inferring that this was my plan for it, Alex came home from Ikea with a frame to put it in, and voila … instant artwork.

Next, I learned how flippin’ expensive it is to have something professionally framed. I had a print featuring Congress Hall, the historic hotel where Alex and I are getting married in the spring. This sentimental print cost me $15, a worthwhile investment in something that would remind us of our wedding venue. When AC Moore was having a 55% off custom framing sale, I marched in with it, and picked out my favorite “beachy” frame (since Congress Hall is at the beach) & Tiffany-blue matting (since the ballroom there is painted Tiffany-blue). I was floored when they told me the price would be $150. And this was after the 55% discount. Are. You. Serious?? At that point they’d placed the order, and because it’s very important to me to look like I know what I’m doing, I clearly had to pretend that I expected this all along, because of course I have had things professionally framed before, because I’m classy like that. So I paid them ten times what the print cost just to have it framed. I will cherish this picture forever.