My Office Makeover..

I never posted pictures of my office redo.  I thought I could redo my office in the week before I started a new quarter of school.  It actually took about three to four weeks, but here's the transformation and all it entailed. (And it was totally, totally worth it!!!)

Before the transformation began.  Purple painted over wallpaper on the walls.  Ugly office grade blue carpet on the floor.  A catch-all for random items. 

I began by removing strips of the purple wallpaper. 

 After getting all that wallpaper down, I spent what felt like about 40 days and 40 nights (actually about 2 days) spraying the walls with vinegar and water.  The thin paper that was left pasted to the wall came off in tiny pieces.  Excruciatingly tiny pieces.  Then, there was a paste left on the wall, so I scrubbed with more vinegar and Dawn dish soap.  By this point I was hating myself for starting this project and I was only 2 days into several weeks worth of fun.  What was I thinking?  

So fast forward several days or a week or so.  I spackle, I sand.  I spackle, I sand.  I finally get the new color on the walls - a color I LOVE - Benjamin Moore's Coventry Gray.  It's the same color that's in my living room, and with white trim it looks just lovely!  I put two coats on.  

Then I prayed to the remodel gods that when I pulled up that detested blue/gray carpet there would be decent wood floor underneath.  And there was decent wood floors underneath, but the carpet had been glued to it, and before that the wood floors had been sprayed with white paint.  

   

 I pulled up the tack strips along the wall, which was easy, but there were also these heavy duty staples pushed into the wood floor that were monsters to get out.  Don't look too closely because there might be one or five left in the floor that I just couldn't get out.  Then I scraped paint and glue off the floor, then scrubbed and scrubbed with Murphy's Oil Soap.  That is an amazing little potion!  

 Another 40 days and 40 nights later (it seemed) I was seeing vast improvement.  But!  What you can't really see in these pictures, but was obvious when in the room, was that there was a big gap between the baseboard and the floor where the carpet used to be.  What to do?  Take the baseboard off and move it down?  But then the gray wouldn't go far enough down and I'd have to paint that in.  Kyle suggested using quarter round, which some professional contractors see as cheating but I saw as life saving.  I picked some up at Lowe's, as well as a miter box and saw.  I had never cut pieces to fit into corners before, so it was a tiny learning curve but I picked it up quick, and I even kept all my fingers!  So after cutting came nailing, caulking, and painting.  I put frog tape on the floor to protect the clean floor from getting paint on it since I was so close to the floor when painting.  

Then I used a polyurethane coating and coated the floors to make them nice and shiny.  It took three coats with 24 hours in between coats.  And you need a LOT of moving air to get that smell out of the house.  I think Pip, Dobby and I were high for a few days.  

And after that my knees looked like this.  (Ignore the goosebumps.  It was cold.)

 Then I had to wait 7 days to put furniture or carpets on the floor.  Seven days!!!  You should have seen my living room with all the contents of my office stuffed into it.  It was a catastrophe.  In the meantime, I went area rug shopping.  I knew I wanted something squishy for my feet and something pretty.  Target never lets me down.  

 And since I hadn't spent enough time on this project already, I decided I wanted to do something really interesting on the wall with some Penguin postcards I had.  I'd gotten an idea on Pinterest from this post http://littlehousedesign.com/diy-postcard-wall-art/

But what I didn't realize when I started this little endeavor, was that a project like that takes math.  I don't do math.  I can balance my checkbook, but there's limits to what I can achieve.  Never fear, my sister-in-law Penny rescued me.  She helped me convert, and figure, and before I knew it I had a tape outline.

I'm a little obsessive compulsive (seriously), and so I spent hours debating how many of the cards to use.  The box had 100.  I wanted to offset them, so I decided I would use 98. But then which two to leave out?  I finally found two that I didn't like.  But, how to organize them?  Oh, the agony of decisions.  I set to work, but good, grief!  Not only did I have to measure above and below each one but beside!  And then I had to put 98 of them on the wall, one at a time!  What was I thinking?!?  (Notice how I ask myself this question quite often?)  Pandora and I hung out for the afternoon and we had it done in a few hours.  And it was all worth it!

I moved bookshelves and my desk and my chair back into my office.  

All my craft bins, organized by type of project, went into the closet area.  I currently have the doors removed because it made it much easier to access my supplies.  I don't like the sliding doors that were originally in there.  Eventually I will put bifold doors on the closet, but for now I've spent my budget on the redo, so it's just going to remain open for the time being.  I put a tiny bit of my hedgie collection on the top shelf of the bookshelf.  I have many, many more, but I have to figure out a better way to display them.  

 And my little angel on the door reminding me to "Dwell in Possibility". (Thanks, Maggie!)

So now I have a beautiful and cozy place to study, to Skype for my mock counseling practice sessions, and to craft when I can't sleep in the wee hours of the morning.  I am really loving it so far.  It was worth the headaches, the chaos of the contents of two rooms in one for four weeks, the fumes from polyurethane and paint, and the blisters, calluses and bruises.  It made me feel so good to do this project from start to finish with no help other than a few suggestions from Kyle when I was stumped about where to go next.  It makes me want to redo other rooms in my house.  Sort of.