There have been a couple changes in my office since you’ve last seen it.  I (okay, The Hubs) put up the invisible bookshelves I have been wanting for so long.

But, much bigger than that, I finally saved up enough to pick up the cowhide rug!

And here is how the office typically looks.  Only add a little more mess…

I’m so happy with the rug.  It really warmed the space up and grounded it with the organic element it adds.  But as happy as I am, I think our buddy Roscoe might be even happier, he likes the fur rugs even more than the sofa now.

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Here it is: our small office guest room in it’s current state!  These are definitely not “After” shots as there are still projects to start and organizing to finish.  But before that happens, I’m very anxious to finally get back to working in here, the shop has been on hold for too long.

We painted the walls a very light gray, and the ceiling a crisp, spring-y blue (Martha Stewart’s Cumulus Cloud and Enamelware).  The desk and floating shelves are from IKEA.  I’m still so excited that I get to have a 5′ by 3′ desk AND a sofa bed in an 8′ wide room.

The command center is still in progress, but the cork board and dry erase board were finished today.

The empty frame will soon have some small, shallow wall shelves inside to hold supplies and/or products.  This morning, the cork and dry erase boards were gold inside, but I had a sudden change of mind and made them white lace instead.  Need my girly touches since the walls aren’t pink.

Still saving for the cowhide, and will probably get more white bins and/or baskets to keep the shelves simple and uncluttered.  Once we can get our hands on a few more wine crates, they will be stacked and turned into movable shelves.

(You can read more about the sofa bed and how it fits into the room perfectly here.)  I’ll keep you updated as this room continues to change.

We started clearing out the powder room last night and we’ve already discovered several additional “issues” that will need to be addressed.  There are a couple strange dilemmas that I will probably need your help with!

PS Here is the latest update on the office.

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One of the challenges that came with getting a sofa that takes up the whole width of the guest room/office is that there is no room for end tables.

So, yesterday we pulled out some leftover lumber we had from our ladder project and made some wall mounted shelves to go behind the sofa and act as end tables.

I forgot to take photos of most of the process, but it’s pretty simple.

We wanted two shelves, one on each side of the window, level with the window sill.  We used a 4” wide board and a 1.5” wide board and cut two sets to fit from the window to the wall.  Then we placed the 1.5” board on it’s short end on top of the edge of the 4” board to make an L shape and screwed them together (with 2” wood screws).

I painted the shelves the same gray as the walls and then we mounted them to the wall behind the sofa by putting screws through 1.5” board.

Now there is a space for a book and a glass of water.

And I like that it adds some depth to that part of the room.

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We put up the three floating shelves again on the wall by my desk.  I started to bring things back into the office to begin setting it up and there was a big problem.  I didn’t have nearly enough storage.  We wanted to add more floating shelves to the corner of the room on the other side of my desk.  But IKEA’s Lack floating shelves only come in 1 foot or 3.5 feet.  We have just over 2 feet and I really didn’t want to put two 1 foot sections side-by-side and have a seam down the middle.  Here’s what we did:

Purchased 3 more 3.5 foot floating shelves, cut off the excess foot and a half, mounted them in the corner.  Sorry, I didn’t get any pictures, but it really was that easy (as long as you have a chop saw and another saw suitable for cutting the metal bracket that holds the shelf up). 

Here’s a preview of the shelves.  I was going to show you more, but the office is so close to being finished that I want to save it all for the “Before and After” post. 

Oh, and the blog now has a Facebook page.  Feel free to stop over and Like it so you can follow along on there.  I plan on posting preview pictures on there from time to time and highlighting other blogger’s posts that I think you’ll find helpful and fun.  (There’s a page for the shop too!)

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Matchstick blinds are great.  They add privacy, filter light without blocking it, bring in the natural element to rooms that are lacking it and they look great with or without curtains flanking them.  But, around here, the cost starts around $30 for a 2 foot wide window.  Unless you go to Big Lots discount store, where they are $5 a piece.  BIG difference.  But here’s why they are so much cheaper, the ones for $30 and up come with valances to hide the hardware and the ones from Big Lots look like this:

Not so pretty.  But with three windows in this room, I just wasn’t going to spend over $90 just on the blinds when I could spend $15.  But the icky exposed hardware was driving me nuts, so I figured out a way to make a valance for them.  Here is how:

I purchased an additional bamboo matchstick blind for another $5 and started by cutting the strings to remove the top piece of bamboo with the hanging hardware. 

Then pull out several of the bamboo sticks until you have enough string left over to tie the strings back together. 

And tie each set of strings in double knots to secure the sticks.  This will take a while, depending on the length of your blinds, so put some music on and get in a knot-tying groove. 

Measure how tall you want your valances to be , then add about an inch and a half to that number and cut the strings down the length of the blinds again.  Pull out about an inch and a half of the bamboo sticks from the ends, so you can tie together the strings like before.  When you’re done, you should have a section of blinds that looks like this:

Fold that piece in half so the long edges are touching and tie together each set of strings. 

When they are all tied together, center your new seam. 

And there is your new valance!  It will look better once it’s hanging, don’t worry.  Now let’s put up some nails to hang it with.  Back at your window, put in two small finishing nails above the hanging hardware.

Now just hang your new matchstick valance by propping it up on the two finishing nails. 

Your hardware is covered and instead of $90 for three windows, it only cost $20. 

A lot more finished and expensive-looking for just $5 and about 15 minutes. 

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I don’t have any finished projects to show today.  Earlier in the week, I had reluctantly decided to strip the paint off my office floor.  I don’t want to use those nasty paint stripping chemicals, so it was going to be a long and ugly process with scrapers and a heat gun and rubbing alcohol.

As much as I love white painted floors, my office was just too cold looking with all the white furniture, gray walls and blue  ceiling.  I planned on having some wood-toned furniture, but it didn’t turn out that way and I didn’t think warm-toned accessories would be enough to balance it.  So I started heating up and scraping away the paint on an already damaged section of the floor. 

As I was writing today’s post to tell you about my plans, I changed my mind.  Again.  Because I think I came up with a better solution: a cowhide rug.  I have been wanting one for a long, long time, I just never had a good place to put one.  It’s a perfect plan so far in my head: a big white and brown cowhide will take up about 1/3 of the exposed floor.  It will bring in dark brown to warm and ground the room, the organic lines will help balance all the square edges and it will bring in the texture, pattern and the natural element that the room is still lacking. 

Rut Karadottir via Desire to Inspire

Now I just need to save up a little for the rug (thankfully Ikea sells them cheap!) and figure out how to fix up the area where I removed the paint.  Oops.

Think it will be enough to balance the room?  Maybe combined with some matchstick blinds? 

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I was really torn for quite some time about which sofa bed would work in my 8 foot wide office.  I really wanted my desk on the long wall that you face when you walk in the room (like it is here), but if it were on that wall, it would get in the way of opening up a traditional sofa bed.

The IKEA Karlstad sofa bed.  I had known for a while that they made a sofa bed version of Karlstad, but I had no idea about the best part of it: it opens lengthwise!

How cool is that?  Move your mouse over the floor plan photo to see what helped us decide on this sofa.  We did that for each one we were considering and all of the rest stuck out so far that they overlapped the desk.

So, we get a good looking sofa (not a traditional look like I was hoping for, but still good looking and still goes in the space), it only takes up 5 feet when it’s in bed position, and it sleeps 2 people! It even has storage space for bed linens inside. And it’s comfy too.

And the big bonus right now is that IKEA is offering 15% back in the form of a gift card if you purchase a Karlstad, but the offer only lasts 2 more days, so if you want one, go buy it by Sunday!

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Painting the office has been really tricky so far.  Remember the massive amount of stuff we had crammed in here? 

The bed has been moved to the hallway (yes, a 3 foot wide hallway), the mattress and box spring are in the living room and the dollhouse and linens/pillows are now in The Hubs office in the attic.  Even with some of the biggest things out of the room, we were still left with tons of stuff.  So I moved as much as I could into the bathroom.

And a bunch more into our bedroom.  But I won’t show you that, because it’s just too embarrassing.   And STILL, we were left with this much stuff, and not a square foot of house left to move it to.  So, my challenge this week was to paint around it.  Ick. 

Painting half of a wall and letting it dry is NOT recommended.  But, when you have a teeny-weeny house that’s packed full of stuff, what are you gonna do? 

As you can see, I painted the back wall and about 1/4 of the side walls.  I did two coats (which sufficiently covered the walls), and then moved all of that stuff back into the painted section of the room, like this:

And this is what the room looks like this morning.  Next, I’ll be painting the wall on the left.  Once that starts to dry, I will move my desk over there and then take down the wall shelves on the right and paint the final corner. 

At least I’m getting lots of exercise!  And it’s getting done, which makes me very happy.  And I am loving the blue ceiling and gray walls in the satin finish.  See how much light gets reflected?  Way better than the dingy flat yellow that absorbed all the beautiful sunshine that comes into this room. 

Hopefully by Monday, we’ll have a painted room to show you.  What projects are you working on this weekend? 

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After picking out an all new whole house color scheme from Martha’s line, I made a new mood board for my office.

I decided against pink for the walls because I am hoping to be able to take product photos in there and I don’t want to give everything a pink hue.  The walls will be a light gray and the ceiling will be my favorite light clear blue “Enamelware.”  The walls and ceiling will be in a satin finish to reflect more light and I think the floor may just get a fresh coat of white paint, still not sure about that yet.

That is the desk I stole from The Hubs and am currently using.  The size is fantastic at 5 x 3.  (Even though, as I currently write this, there is barely a space cleared off for the computer and tea cup, since it’s packed with stacks of papers and frames and supplies—once I have some wall storage, that should improve right?)

We decided to go with the classic Karlstad sofa bed from IKEA.  It will take up all but 6 inches of the width of the room, so we will put in wall shelves behind it instead of end tables and wall mounted lights on both ends.

This week, we should finally tackle the wiring and then get the painting done by next weekend at the latest so we can get on to the fun part of organizing and decorating.

Still struggling with what kind of wall shelves to buy or make that aren’t too deep.  I need so much storage in here.  Any favorites to suggest?

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I’ve been dying to dip something.  Banana leaf baskets would be so cool, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.  Baskets are just too pricey for me to do something so trendy to.  This adorable bowl, however, was a different story.

It only cost:

Because Goodwill likes to write on wood with black markers.

Back to dipping.  I sanded the little cutie, then cleaned it very well.  Because I didn’t want to dump the paint into another container and then have to throw the unused paint away.  I know, it’s not a good idea to put objects directly into the paint can, but wasting stinks.  (Mom, don’t let Dad see this post.)

A bowl of mint-dipped cuteness.

I let it dry on parchment paper (because I didn’t realize I was out of wax paper).  It worked.  I didn’t notice until this picture that the bowl is very similar in shape to the little white bowls in the background.  I wonder if there is anything I own that isn’t a little quirky.  Hmmm.

I excitedly showed hubby (who isn’t yet on board with the dipping trend) and he replied “It looks like you dropped it in a paint can.” 

Here it is hard at work on my still unorganized and unstyled shelf, holding lables for my shop. 

The can of paint was from the Oops section, as usual.  I went in planning on buying a quart of mint paint and found a whole gallon for only $7.  It was purchased, and used, for many other projects so far.  So the total for this little project was less than $1.50.

(Today’s post was supposed to be more front porch projects being accomplished, but not much has been accomplished since last Thursday.  We did start laying down weed barrier in the flower bed yesterday, and I got some flowers planted in pots, but there’s nothing to look at yet, hopefully by Wednesday.) 

Anyway!  How do you feel about the dipping trend?  Have you tried it yet?

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