Easy as A-B-C: Home office makeover

Well, maybe not exactly easy (and it definitely wasn’t fast!), but this makeover was a lot of fun :-)

Have I mentioned that when we moved into our house in 2001, almost the whole house was painted green? This was the previous owner’s gun room. Seriously. There were bullet casings sitting on the ledge when we moved in. The green walls and orangey wood trim is just icky. Not crazy about the parquet floor either.

At one point, I repainted the room brown and turned it into a guest bedroom. But that didn’t work out so well because nobody wanted to sleep in the basement. The purple guest bedroom on the main floor is way more popular! So I decided to turn the room into a home office. I love to write I wanted my office to be creative and inspiring, so I used this nursery that I found on Rate My Space as my inspiration:

The colours for my office came from the striped rug you can see at the bottom of this picture (I ended up returning the rug because it just didn’t fit properly in the room).

All the paint colours are Sico. From left to right – the walls are Powdered Iron 6173-31, the light letters are Iron Salts 6173-11, and the dark letters are Iron Rod 6173-52.

I created a letter mural in Adobe Illustrator. Hubby borrowed a projector from work one weekend, and we used it to project the AI file onto the walls. Good thing he’s so smart – he figured out how to project the image off a mirror and onto the wall to get it big enough :-) Then we traced all the letters onto the wall. And then it was the fun part – painting every single letter by hand. UGH! I taped off as many letter as I could, but the big C and the big Q were pretty much done all free-hand.

It was a big job and it took a LOT of patience. But I did it in chunks of a couple of hours at a time, and I got the letters painted in about a week.

Our dog Carbo died while I was working on the letter mural. Can you see my tribute to him at the right end of this wall??

I tried painting the small letters to spell words (see Laugh and Goals above?), but it was really hard painting the small letters, and they came out kind of sloppy. I found a printer in Ottawa (Business Cents) that could print the words for me on silver vinyl. Much faster and easier to stick the letters to the wall than to paint them!

 

As you can see in the two pictures above, the parquet floor is gone. We planned to have the parquet refinished. But when Luigi the flooring guy started to work on the floors, he discovered water damage that we weren’t aware of. Crap! Well, 50% crap – this meant we had to pull up all the parquet and replace it, which delayed things. But that gave us an excuse to get rid of the parquet that we didn’t like anyway :-) We got a deal on zebrano laminate at Home Depot. It was discontinued and they only had about 27 boxes, but that was enough for my little office, my craft room, and a friend’s sunroom :-)

At this point, there was a long gap in time before we made more progress on my office. Eventually, hubby drywalled over the steel I-beam and pipes that you can see in this picture:

And then we had to do something about that unfinished basement ceiling. We eventually came up with a design for a drop ceiling that looks like a coffered ceiling. Hubby also removed the one bulb in the middle of the room and replaced it with four pot lights.

The office door was originally a pinky oak pocket door in the kitchen. Hubby cut it down to size, and then I primed it and painted it white. I also painted the brass trim around the windows black, to emulate the black steel doors & windows that I love :-)

A tassel specially made by my blog friend Angela dresses up the door perfectly:-)

And then it was time to put the room together. Weeehoooo! At the time, I needed a drafting table for the Drafting course that I was taking, so I had to arrange the furniture differently than I’d originally planned. But that’s OK, because the revised layout works great. So with no further ado, here’s my finished office…

See the mirrored birds on the walls? They’re magnetic, and I attached them to the wall simply by finding the drywall screws – the metal screws attract the magnets :-)

 

I really wanted the Vika Glasholm glass desk top from Ikea, but none of the legs that I liked worked with this top. So, we designed and built the desk base :-) It’s walnut with purple heartwood in the corners. The glass sits on little rubber pads that are stuck to the top of the desk base.

As you can see, the glass top continues the alphabet/word theme :-)

I wanted a rug on the floor to add some softness and warmth, but I didn’t want anything too big because I love the zebrano flooring and didn’t want to hide too much of it. This faux lambskin rug from HomeSense is perfect :-)

I created a number of vignettes along the ledge. My mom made these A & Z ceramic bookends years ago, and now I have the perfect spot for them :-)

The two purple paintings are by my friend, New Brunswick abstract artist Matt LeBlanc. I made the turquoise painting years ago, but never found a place to hang it. I thought it would work well with Matt’s paintings…

The purple & turquoise of the paintings are repeated in the picture of the Amos Pewter shop in Mahone Bay, NS (might have to paint that frame one of these days)

Just to keep it real, this is how my office REALLY looks most of the time!

Hahahaa! Yep, I’m a slob! It’s all part of the creative process ;-) One last look…

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