Our house has three bedrooms; master bedroom (which you recently saw re-vamped), Luke's room, and what has been the office/storage room. Well, I decided (especially after Luke's 1st birthday) to make the office/storage room a playroom for Luke, which leaves me needing some place to write bills, store pens, paper, tape, etc. So, I ended up making the end of the hall in between Luke's room and playroom, a little office nook. The end of the hall started out as just that; a plain, dark end of the hall. The inspiration for this project is Rhoda's office space seen here. Here's how mine turned out...
Before: The wall as the same color as the other walls; antique piece of furniture (called a secretary) that I used as the office component, the front of it folds down to make a desk top and it has four drawers below and a cabinet display shelf unit above.
First step: Painting the wall; this is the same color as my guest bathroom (I'll be posting about those DIY projects soon), it is a Behr color called Caribbean Coral.
Second step: Adding the trim; I added this chocolate, velvet trim that I bought at Joann Fabric. I ended up using white thumb tacks to hold it to the wall. I thought this worked out nicely, because it looks a little like upholstery tacks.
Final step: Decorating and accessorizing-my favorite part!:) I re-purposed these three Southern Living at Home trivets as wall art and used my small library of decorating books on the left side of the top of the secretary. I also used an antique apothecary jar, more books, and a hurricane candle holder to finish out decorating the top.
Here is the cabinet shelf unit. I forgot to take an upclose picture, but I taped scrapbook paper to the back that has a paisley pattern and a lot of the colors of my house in the design. My mom helped me get the items on the shelves arranged just right and I love the way it came it. I also used velcro to add push lights to the top to add some lighting down in this dark end of the hall and so you could see all the "pretties" better.
And here's the final product! Like I said when I was doing the master bedroom re-do, decorating is never "done" to me, but this at least is a great start and result up to this point! Let me know what ya think, and also how have you incorporated an office into your house? Do you have a room or just a little space you would call a nook? Also, look for a post at the end of the week to see how I've re-vamped our back porch!
Meredith, I love this project! I remember that hall when it was dark (a good place for nutcrackers to hide!), and what you've done to it looks great! I've been looking at apartments recently (I'm living off-campus now) and wondering what I could do for an office/desk space... I think I've found my answer! :) Questions- are the lights in the display case the only extra lighting for your desk? and did you use any special kind of tape for the paper? Because I'd be afraid to put tape in an antique piece of furniture, but I like the effect.
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