Office Updates Part 1

So if you follow me on Flickr you may have noticed I was very busy in March working on some updates to my office. In March we celebrated 6 years in this house. Which means the boy and I have been spending about 5.75 years figuring out the best layout for my home office. We’ve gone back and forth many times about building shelves to store everything but we continued to run into issues figuring out how to build the shelves in a most attractive way around the windows. One Saturday morning while discussing this project, again, the boy pulled up Centsational Girl’s blog post on turning Ikea Billy Bookcases into built-ins and he was excited about implementing it in my office. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after being together for 10 years it’s that if he’s excited about building something, run with it! 😀

First things, first, I remembered to take actual before photos. I always forget to take those before I embark on a large cleaning project and so you never get to see the horror of the mess that incites the need to embark on a large cleaning project. This is the mess my office usually devolves into when I am working on a million projects at a time and can’t find a home for half of my supplies where I can see them. Turns out I am a very visual person and if I can’t see my supplies I forget about them.

One of the quickest and best solutions to the office mess (suggested by my friend Rose who helped me figure out an overall layout) was to move the filing cabinet to the basement. That let us open up the whole desk wall for the Billy bookcase built-ins. It also took maybe 30 minutes to do. Hooray for quick fixes!

We got together with some friends who also needed to make an Ikea run (the closest Ikea is 3.5 hrs round trip from us) and took the first Saturday in March to run down there and pick up all of the things we needed. I also bought a Sherwin-Williams gift card so that an interior designer would come to our home and help me pick out the right shade of purple for my office (and subsequently lovely colors for the remaining rooms in the house that need to be painted). The lighter purple is the color that ended up in my office.

Because the built-ins were going to take up the whole wall I did some quick internet research on what to do with the carpet underneath where the shelves were going. The best internet carpenters say to remove the carpet because overtime it could cause issues with the stability of the shelves and well it’s the right thing to do. So I also finally! got to buy new carpet for this room. I picked out a carpet and we decided we’d do all the tear out since we planned to paint our baseboards to match the color of the new wall o’shelves. Ripping out the carpet meant EVERYTHING had to come out of the office which led my guest bedrooms to look like this:

I found myself playing monkey and hot lava trying to get to any of the yarn or sewing supplies I needed while this project was going on. Three cheers for working out lately giving me greater arm strength to hang from the top bunk with! haha.

We rolled up the carpet, keeping it whole, while removing it because we plan to put it in the unfinished portion of our basement to cover the cold concrete. Alas, we were not able to get it out whole and we found out that the bottom of the carpet makes for amazingly rough sandpaper on door jams. So, Chris had to cut the carpet in half. Then he was able to get it down the stairs.

The last prep step before painting the walls was four coats of paint that turned the baseboards from dark lovely wood to Ikea white. We took one of the shelf boards to Sherwin-Williams and they used their magic eye thing and ta DA! we had a can of trim paint that was the same color as the shelves.

This post is getting long so I think I’ll wrap it up here with a sneak peek of what’s to come. 🙂

Lots more work, some awesome helpers and a gorgeous office in the end! A gorgeous office that I am still sifting, sorting and purging items from.

Have you been working on any spring cleaning or larger home projects lately?