Office Space

No, this post is not about the hilarious movie Office Space....it's actually about my office, although I might just throw this in for good measure:

(image from here)

Oh, Milton...Anyway, in our house, right when you go up these stairs..

To the left of the landing is my office space. As I mentioned before, these walls used to be tan and brown sponge painted, so what you see now is quite the improvement. We painted them the same color as our living room, Glidden's Water Chestnut. It's a nice light, neutral tan color and it has really brightened up the space.

If you immediately turn left after going up the stairs, this is the wall on your right hand side:

This is that same wall that the yellow flower painting is on (It's from IKEA by the way). The walls up here all used to be brown with sponge-paint until we painted over it. We started painting the trim white, too. About 3/4 of the walls in this space are painted - there is a nook over the stairs that's still brown and needs to be finished. It's in a harder-to-reach area that's kinda cluttered right now with some of Trent's old things.

The upstairs used to be Trent's when he lived here with his parents. In the picture above on the far left you can see the start of a doorway - that goes into what used to be Trent's bedroom, and what will hopefully become the guest bedroom someday. Right now it is storage to yard sale totes and our old junk that needs to be dealt with!

Here's another picture of that wall:

On the right you can see a cut-out closet door. Trent's old things are in that closet. You can see there's some sort of paneling on the walls too, which we painted over. I just hung a few office-y things on this wall: Starting with the top left - my award for Five Years of Government Service, my Bachelor's degree, a photo from my college graduation, and Trent's Employee of the Month award from the Security company he works for. And of course, there's my Wallflowers! :) I love them. I got them when I first moved in from Bed, Bath, and Beyond, and was waiting until we painted upstairs so I could put them up! Here's the box that they came in, in case you're wondering what brand they are:

They're a plastic material, and the backs have pins you can stick into whatever - we just used the pins to stick them right into the paneling on the wall.

When you turn a little more to the left, you see my tiny office space! Low, slanted ceilings and all.

It's a little messy..I honestly didn't bother making it look nice or styling it or anything. The trash in the corner is even full. But this is my little space and I'm keeping it real.

I got my desk from Walmart.com and I like it (It's this one in silver), the chair is from Amazon (This one - I wish I would've splurged and gotten a little bit nicer one though, because the arm on it is already broken!), the lamp is from Target, the white and gray storage drawers on my desk are from the Container Store (These), my two white pencil cups are these, also from the Container Store. The pillow on my chair is one I had from when I was in college. My mouse pad is from Amazon, and it's Vincent Van Gogh's painting, "The Cafe Terrace" - this one.

You might have already seen the memo board I made in This Post, but here she is again in my office:

I told you, I wasn't lying about needing to empty my trash can:

You can see that we installed beadboard and trim against that wall - and we still need to finish trimming it off - there are still gaps where the ceiling meets the wall paneling. The unfinished nook is to the left of this area and still needs painted.

 

I think this little flower arrangement was from Target. I can't remember where those two little silver birds came from, but I'm thinking maybe Marshall's? And I have way too many textbooks from college on my bookshelves..along with my art and design books..journals, etc. I'd like to paint the bookshelves someday. White maybe, with a pattern or pop of color inside? Not sure. They're just cheapo 3-drawer ones I got at Menards. I assembled them all by myself. :)

So there you have my office as it looks today. Some things we'd still like to do up here are:

1) Finish painting

2) Replace the flooring

3) Clear out all the junk

4) Finish the guest bedroom

5) Put in new electrical

6) Eventually gut it all and rebuild it

Who knows when Step 6 will be completed, if ever!

Beachy Decor

It's Friday! Woo hoo! I may or may not have the song "Some Beach" in my head today after the additional snow we got last night. Ugh..summer needs to come soon! Luckily, I have a very beachy decor post to transport us to somewhere other than the midwest.

You might already know that last summer Trent and I vacay'ed on the East Coast. We went to lots of beachy places - Virginia Beach, Wrightsville Beach, Myrtle Beach, and the Outer Banks to name a few. So we collected some items like seashells and sea anenomes (sp?), and the like...ok, maybe not sea anenomes..unless a starfish is a sea anenome? Anyway, It didn't take me too long to decide that I wanted to display them!

You may have already seen the shadow box project I made in This Post. If not, you can just click on that link to see it. It was a small shadowbox frame filled with little mementos from our stay in Myrtle Beach at the end of our trip.

Here's a couple of other items from our beachy vacation I've included into our decor:

1. A Jar of Seashells

We had collected quite a few seashells on the beaches during our vacation, and I knew I wanted to store them in something and display them for a nice little memento of our trip. So I just grabbed one of these sealed-lid glass jars (I think it was from Wal-Mart) and put them inside. And voila!

Now they're on my nightstand in the bedroom. I don't really have another place for them yet..Maybe in the future I might put them on a shelf somewhere where they can be properly displayed. 

I also thought about putting a cute little chalkboard label on the jar too, that says "East Coast 2012" or something like that. Then over the years when we visit other beaches, we can have multiple jars of shells that each say different locations. I just may do that in the future. And for the second beachy decor item..

2. A Starfish

This one I actually happen to have a shelf for. It's in the bathroom. I haven't shown too many pictures of our bathroom before, but don't worry - You're not missing out on much. This is the one area I like in our bathroom. We put up this floating shelf, but the wall couldn't support it very well, so we added a couple of corbels to help hold it up. Now we use it to hold our jars of cotton swabs and cotton balls, a cute little candle holder from Kohl's, and this starfish:

I can't remember exactly where on our vacation I bought it, but I believe it was in Virginia Beach. I kept seeing them in the gift shops we went to and decided I couldn't leave without picking up a starfish! I love it.

The artwork is actually something I picked up from Target on clearance. I think it ties in well with the "sophisticated beachy" theme I want going on in there (don't know how else to describe it, but we'll call it that for now). The bathroom will hopefully be completely gutted and redone within the next couple of years, but I definitely want to paint it a gray color like it is now, but a little lighter. Right now the color reminds me of cold concrete. I'd like to warm it up a bit..but for now, I can say it's much better than the color that was in there when I moved in - a not-so-lovely peachy yellow!

Pinterest Project: Fabric Memo Board

I have another Pinterest Project to share today. My third one this month...and pretty soon (ahem..Wednesday the 27th) I'm going to post my FOURTH this month because I finally get to take part in the Pinterest Challenge! So excited, and already have my idea planned out!

But onto the topic at hand - for the project I'm sharing today, I wanted to make a big memo board for my office and was inspired by some on Pinterest. I made this probably a little over a year or so ago (can't remember) and don't have pictures of the process. But I do have some of the final result. First, though, here are a few I liked that I saw on Pinterest:

(From here)

(From here)

(From here)

The board I made is actually really similar to the first one above. Many of the boards I saw used burlap, but I chose to use actual fabric that had a similar texture and look as burlap. Here's how mine turned out:

This is a picture of it hanging in my office. I really like it! Sorry it's kind of crazy looking..I didn't style it all. I took this picture earlier this week, and this was literally how it looked when I walked in my office. Notice how I still have last year's calendar up. I really need to get a new one! Anyway though, I keep my calendar and some inspirational photos and magazine clippings up there to just to look at and make me happy. (By the way, my office is right when you walk upstairs in our house - I will have a post on here soon showing more if it!)

To make the memo board, I just used a large bulletin board made by Board Dudes, that I think I found at K-mart. I don't have a photo of it, but it looked really similar to this:

Then I just wrapped some fabric tightly over it and used a staple gun to staple it to the back of the board. The fabric is similar in look to burlap, but tighter-knit and softer - Here's a close-up of the board so you can see the fabric a little better:

Once the fabric was stapled in place, I stuck these decorative nails in, spaced evenly apart around the edges for some fancy nail head trim:

It's been a while since I made this, so I can't remember how far apart I spaced the nails or how many packages of these I needed, but I think I had purchased two of these little packages, and ended up going back to the store to pick up another one because I needed more. As you can see though, I have a few left over still to use for other projects.

Pushing the nails in was probably the trickiest part. I used a ruler to guide me which helped when spacing the nail heads around the board - but there were a few times I had to take nails out and reposition them or space them further apart, etc. And my thumb was definitely sore after pushing all those nail heads in! I'm really happy with how it turned out though.

Here's another close-up of some of the clippings I have pinned to my board:

And of course a copy of one of my favorite Shel Silverstein poems:

It makes me happy and kind of reminds me of Trent and I, and our House. :)

  

Dish Obsessed

This post might make me look like the little old lady who lived in a shoe or something, but I really wanted to share my China collection today! I don't collect too many things, but when I moved into the house, I just kind of started collecting pretty plates to display. Now everytime I go to an antique store, thrift store, or yard sale, I always look for a new plate to add to my collection. You might have already seen my China cabinet:

It used to be my grandma's - it's an antique and now lives in our living room. I love it. And I have some of my favorite dishes in here, most of which were also my grandma's (except the white one with the blue and gold edge, that one I picked up at an antique store):

My other dishes are hanging in the kitchen. These are ones I've collected from antique shops and yard sales. I like to choose ones that make me happy, or just those I like the colors or the design of.

They're definitely a mix of different styles and colors. But they are all plates I was drawn to or that caught my eye. And I never really pay over $10 for them. They have to be reasonably priced for me to buy them. I've seen ones I loved in antique stores but they were just way over my budget. If I find one I really, really like I may pay up to $25 or so, but none of these have been that much! I'm not sure how much the plates I got from my grandma are worth, but this one is my favorite:

I hope you liked my happy little plates! Can't wait to go antiquing this summer and add more to my collection! :)