office progress

I've kinda gotten lazy lately, and posted pics of the evolution of my home office, but without explanation, like in last week's post about my 2012 mantra, and in my house tour page. But now here's the full status update. (Or you can just scroll toward the bottom for some prettier "after" pics.)

When we left off, the office was starting to come together in terms of the space plan, but color was lacking, and I mused about possible colors in this post. In the end, that crazy shade of turquoise/teal at the top of the post won out, and for a few reasons:

1. Despite the proliferation of turquoises and blues in our first place, we're leaning much more in the yellowy green direction in this house, and I wanted my office to feel very different, since it's work. That way, when I go into my office, I see the bold color and my subconscious mind knows, "Okay, time to be productive," and when I leave, and go back to the muted colors, my subconscious mind can say, "Mmmmmm, donuts..."

2. I wanted a really cheerful color. Since it's work.

3. I just really love this color.

BUT, since we've only been painting walls for a few years now, and all the walls we've painted have been pretty sedate colors (or, as Mark would call most of them, "white"), I still definitely had a little "Oh, $#%@" moment when I cracked open the can and realized I was about to paint this SUPER BRIGHT, BOLD COLOR on my office wall. And then I remembered: It's just paint. I can always change it. It's a relief knowing that.

UPDATE: In case you're curious, the color is very close to Walmart's Exotic Peacock Plume (10777), which couldn't be color-matched exactly into Olympic Premium no-VOC paint. The actual color is a custom blend that's halfway between Olympic Caribbean Splash (B57-6) and Jamaican Dream (B56-6). The nice lady at Lowe's helped us get as close as possible to what we wanted, even without an exact match. (This was pre-boycott, of course. Now we're sticking with our local store, and the big orange box.) 

And so, in the course of one evening, my office got a big facelift. Sans dropcloth. At the time it was out of impatience and the fact that I couldn't really fit anything in the tight space I had to paint (except for one mini cloth to hold the paint can and roller tray), but since I didn't end up spilling a single droplet of paint or splattering or anything, I now feel kinda badass about it. Painters tape and dropcloths?! Pish posh! Real women cut in freehand, and don't need no stinkin' dropcloths. Or something.

As you can see in some of those shots, our walls are super textured. (I believe the preferred term for what our walls are sporting is "knock down texture," which I hear was all the rage circa 1992.) So that meant I needed three coats to get complete coverage with no little white spots sticking out. But thanks to our dry mountain air, each coat dried super fast, and so it really was a one evening job. Hooray.

Then to put it all back together, with my DIYed L-shaped desk and work-height sewing table, 100 percent courtesy of Ikea (and many allen wrenches).

My "real work" desk area is pretty much done, at least for now.

But as for the sewing table...

It has already gone from this...

To this...

But there's lots more organization to come, and hopefully some more tidiness. I can already tell you, though, that I LOVE the rail on the wall that keeps scissors and gadgets at the ready. A lot of that stuff will eventually go into drawers once I have drawers, but it's still a cool system. And only a couple bucks at Ikea.

Speaking of tidiness, or rather untidiness, here's how my office is looking on a real day, and not a posing-for-pictures day.

Additions since the earlier, staged pictures include a phone and company phone list, my flea market Shakespeare bust, a big bottle of water so I don't dehydrate, my coffee cup hotplate (drinks get cold so quickly in our chilly house!), an aromatherapy spray bottle, fingerless gloves for typing in the previously mentioned chilly house, various pics and postcards on the magnet board and a bunch of paperwork generally.

Why is any of that important? It's not.

But it's easy for any room or an entire home to look beautiful when perfectly spotless and staged. It's a whole other thing for it to look good when it's lived in and a little messy. And on that measure, I think my new office is doing A-okay. I credit the pretty blue walls.

Taken on any bold color adventures lately? I'm feeling pretty emboldened after this one! No telling what comes next... (Shhhh. Don't tell Mark that our family room is soon gonna make friends with yellowy orange. Or you can, since he already knows, and is resigned to the fact. But I know he'll love it once it's done.)

If you enjoyed reading this post, why not subscribe or follow? And please comment!

xoxo,