Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Home Tour Tuesday: Home Office...

So this one is going to be a bit of a work in progress reveal because our Home Office isn't 100% finished just yet, but I have been putting off the big reveal for several weeks but I am throwing caution to the wind just this once and tearing off the first aid bandage (we can't say band-aid in our house, long story, but its a Brand Name and not the Brand that Brad sells, so the word has been banned. 

When we first moved into our house in 2005 we had two "home offices", one for our home computer and desk, which resided in Olivia's current room, and the second was my "work from home" office, because when we first relocated to Richmond I was still working for Careerbuilder.com.  My "work from home" office was on the third floor of our house, and was using the 5th Bedroom, take a peek...what a disaster, clearly this room was not photo ready when this was snapped, but you get the idea.

2005 - 3rd Floor Home Office

Office 2005 - 3rd Floor

I can't seem to find a photo of our first home office, but it quickly changed into a Nursery, so it never really took shape, it was always just a temporary location for our 2005 Dell Desktop...

Formal Living Room 2005

In December of 2010 we decided to add a wall between the Formal Living Room and Dining Room so that we could have a "Home Office" type area on the first floor of our house. When I moved to Capital One in September of 2006 we moved our "home office" onto the 3rd floor so we could make room for Olivia's Nursery, but we found that we just never made our way up there, it was too far out of the way, and so the first floor collected a lot of the "should be home office clutter", so the first floor home office was our solution and being that we had no need for a Formal Living Room (come on peeps, we are not formal people) we thought adding a wall and closing it off with French Doors would give us the type of space we were looking for.

View from the Foyer

We moved the Pottery Barn Bedford Furniture downstairs from the 3rd floor, grabbed a bookshelf from the 3rd floor and refinished it, added a swag light and then went to town on the decor...

Standing in the Doorway
The pile of stuff on top of his crate gives me heart palpitations...
We have high hopes of getting Riley's crate out of here, hopes that one day he will be able to roam the house free during the day without emptying his 25 gallon bladder on the Morning Room Hardwoods...I have big plans for that corner...I am going to cover one of our Red Club Chairs with a fun fabric, add a cute little table/dresser and ta-da, a reading area for me to sit and rummage through the lovely home decor magazines I drool over every single month, or laugh and cry while reading Parents magazine, or even better laugh it up while perusing People Magazine on Friday afternoons...can't wait for that day, but I am not holding my breath, we gave him a trial run for a week or so, thought we were close to declaring success and then it went downhill...we haven't given him a second try just yet...

Swag Light
You might notice that the swag light shade is upside down...up, that was a huge whoopsie daisy. I bought the wrong kind of shade, I need a "hard" shade, and didn't realize that until we hung it and the bulb hung below the bottom of the shade, and I had already covered the shade with the fabric, so there was no going back, I could have use the shade on another lamp, but I just wanted to be done with so we, Brad flipped the shade around and we called it a day.


I do happen to love my ribbon organizer to the side of the bookshelf though....

BEFORE...and what you can't see from the photo above is that the inside is painted Navy...you could see it, IF I wasn't using every single inch of space possible to cram our stuff into!
I am a big fan of the storage a bookshelf provides, but would rather the clutter be behind doors, so an option like the Ikea Hemnes Storage Options or the Billy Bookcase, which has the option to add doors. I am indebted to my darling hubs for partnering with me to finish the bookshelf so I can't imagine I am going to change it up anytime soon, but for other areas of the home that need storage, bookshelves with doors, suit my fancy.

Hemnes Storage Combination

Or even the Liatorp Bookcase Combination from Ikea

I still have a lot of organizing to do, some desk accessories to add and a few small touches to finish up, the curtains are being "touched up" a bit by our neighborhood seamstress, so I will reveal those in a separate post!


And under the desk, holy smokes, what a mess. But the good news is. I have seen a ton of ideas on Pinterest to corral all the cords, so that will be a simple task once I put the wheels in motion, just haven't added that to the list just yet.


I would say this room is 75% of where I would like it to be, still have work to do, but very happy with the progress and overly thrilled that we have a home office on the first floor of our house, makes a huge difference, I knock out some quick projects on the Silhouette while the girls play on the floor or even while they watch a movie in the other room...

My favorite part of the room is the "T" Wall...it was one of my first projects after finding my hobby and I am proud of the fact that months later I still really like it.

And this guy wants you to know that he digs the "T" wall too, he stares at it all day long and still has nothing but love for it.

Rugs need to be fused together...two rugs from Lands End $14.99 each

2 comments:

Kearstin said...

Love the office! Where did you find that circle small mirror on your "T" wall? I've been in the hunt for one for a different projects for weeks! Also, just got 3 of the billy bookcases on craigslist for free, now I need your creative juices to figure out what to do with them! ;)

A Boy, His Girls & A Big Dog said...

Target - on clearance in the Spring. Pinterest and the Blog World have TON of ideas for the Billy Bookcases!!!