Mega desk

Blake and I have been coming up with office schemes for the past four years.  The old set-up was fine, but the bulky IKEA desk we had jutted out into the room and made it feel smaller and more broken up.  In our post-Christmas enthusiasm, we decided to finally take the plunge and make the changes we'd been dreaming of.

First, we moved one of the built-in shelving units to under the opposite window to give us a longer, uninterrupted space for a desk.  Then I painstakingly painted the room a soft grey color.  I say painstakingly because there was an incredible amount of trim work in this room with all the built-ins. Thank goodness for audio books and Pandora radio or I might just have gone insane somewhere during the second coat.

I coveted the Pottery Barn Bedford file cabinets for years, but when it came down to it, I couldn't justify spending almost $700 just on file cabinets.   After a long, but fruitful google search, I found a great alternative at Home Decorator Collection.  With a coupon code and free shipping, they were less than a third of the cost and were shipped to our house in three days.  That said, I think you get what you pay for.  Don't get me wrong, the quality of the file cabinets is great, but they took ages to put together and nearly ended my marriage.  (I'm kidding...mostly...)

We didn't like the hardware that came with the cabinets (I thought they looked a tad small and wimpy), so we bought some cheap Martha Stewart pulls at Home Depot.  Adding these suckers turned out to be more of a pain than we'd planned.  We had to drill new holes and it was nearly impossible to get them centered correctly.  What I mean is: don't look too closely.

The desktop is made from reclaimed wood by a local company called The Great British Pine Mine, which is one of my favorite destinations on Antiques Row in Kensington.  It's a custom 10-foot long table top and I've got to say I'm absolutely in love with it.  Now we have space for two work stations and the room feels so much larger.

Next up is hanging the roman shades and building some more shelving in the closet for extra storage. But for now I'll just bask in the glory of a slightly more organized work space.

Better After

The weather today is gorgeous, so after a long walk and lunch with Adrienne, I finished the touch ups on the chair.  Now it's dry and ready to be sat upon.  I'm loving the crisp, clean white (emphasis on clean).  I decided to add a blue plus sign on the back for fun, but I'm not sure if I'll keep it or if I like it better all white.  My spray painting finger is sore today, so for now it'll live to see another morning.  Who knows, maybe when I wake up tomorrow I'll be smitten with it.

I had been skeptical of painting pleather, but after I saw a similar chair that Jenny Komenda did, I took the plunge and bought two cans of Rustoleum multi-surface spray paint.  $6.00 and an hour or two later and I'm already enjoying the finished product.

Not too shabby for a garbage chair.  I only wish I had two (my neighbors had a pair, but kept the other one).  How great would a pair of these look tucked into a long, butcher block-topped desk?

Fill it up. Pin it up.

My weekend girls' trip to Charleston got cancelled at the last minute, so I had an unexpectedly productive weekend.  Friday night I picked up an ugly bulletin board from Target for $9.34 and spent an hour transforming it into a linen and nail-head pinboard courtesy of an idea I spotted in a design magazine and some left-over materials from other projects I had hanging out in our basement. 

Blake helped me hang it (I'm nothing if not horrible at centering/leveling/measuring things) and, there you have it, an under $10.00, under an hour project to fill that horrible blank wall in the study that's been staring me in the face for the past two years. 

Remember how I said that gestational period for my projects is usually about ten months?  Well, this project (from idea to completion) took only a day, but my desire to put something on that wall has been haunting me since we moved into the house. Now, where does that put me in terms of a project timeline?