The Office- For Reals This Time

I did it for reals. We started to re-do the office and we pretty much have the basics down. This is what the office looked like last time I dared to snap a photo:

It was a little more messy than normal because this was during my first painting attempt. It actually got worse (if that is possible) when the roommates stuff moved in, so the office was filled with some of hers and some of ours. This room was just not working in anyway. The old school desk I bought for $2 from an old school about to be torn down in UT, my old dressers from Target that were falling apart, and a broken futon, does not the best office make. It was embarrassing.

After some paint and elbow grease, now our office looks like this!

Or at least this what it looked like the night I came home to see Jeff made the desk, but- MUCH better! We bought these cabinets from Ikea last July and just have not had the space to put them up, since the roomies and our stuff was so packed in that room. I bought them in a moment of insanity when I thought we were rolling in the dough, they are $120 each. That might not seem like much to other folks but that is just how cheap I am. If I were more creative I could have bought some broken shelves from Craigslist and painted them, but I thought these babies were worth the cost . . and I was insane.

I picked these beauties out specifically because of how deep they are, a little over 17 inches. I knew that would be the perfect depth to store our vinyl records. Most standard shelves are just too shallow. Plus with two, we have one for him and one for me. This way I wont go nuts if his shelves get too messy, I'll never even have to see them. (Don't his V-day comic book holders look so cute in there!)

Jeff made our desk from a hollow core door we bought at the Habitat for Humanity Restore for just $10 bucks. I was actually dreaming about how we could make a desk one night and told him how I thought it would work that next morning. That night I came home and he had it ALL done. What a wonderful husband I have!

Look at how cute he is, acting like he didn't just rock my world by making me a little desk. (Pay no attention to our messy garage, a project for another day.)

See how the inside of the door is hollow. All we had to do was make a long 'L' bracket from two 1x2 planks. The one inch side (with a little shaving and sanding, maybe even some cutting) can fit inside the hollow part of the door and secured with glue and nails (underneath, so they wont show). The other part of the 'L' bracket is then used to secure the desk to the wall.

Making the desk ourselves let us customize the width and length, and wouldn't you know it, we chose the same width as the Ikea Shelves and the perfect length to fit in between them. This makes our whole desk and storage area take up just over a foot of wall space along one side of the room. Nice! We have some of the hollow core door left over so we are thinking of making a couple floating display shelves for the office as well. There are a lot of different tutorials on how to make desks, shelves and whatnot online. You can get a ton of DIY tips and hints by just Googling it. Try it, it's fun. Or you can dream about how to do it, either or.

Of course I can't forget the paint. This is the bugger that held up the process for months and months. Thanks to a couple of my favorite bloggers, I found the perfect paint color- BM's Moonshine. This is a true gray, it didn't pull green, or blue, or purple. I love it! I had it color matched to Valspar's no VOC paint so it didn't even smell. Jeff was smart enough to think to color match the Ikea shelves too, so that our desk would match perfectly and look more like a built in shelving system. That really was the look we were going for.

Of course the office isn't DONE, but I think it is finally well on it's way. We still have the broken futon (we probably will until we win the lottery or something), and I still need to hang art and accessorize, but the base is done and NOW the fun part can begin!