A Delayed Update

I spent the first few months of this year redoing our office which was functional but definitely not awesome! After seeing the couple on the Young House Love blog (linked on the right) build a desk customized to the size of their office, I thought, "I can do that!" So I scoured the web for other people who'd done the same thing, collected everything and we went from this desk (IKEA, circa 2004):

 to this desk (homemade, baby!):

The bottoms are some Pottery Barn Bedford Filing Cabinets that we found on the Omaha Craigslist (thank you, Kimberley, for your help!!) and the top is built out of three pine 2x8s that are stained to approximate the floor's finish. Here's a better look at the top coming together:

In typical me fashion, I was too antsy to get started working on the room to take "before" pictures.  So just imagine a gray-green leaf-print wallpaper covering the room with a lovely purple hydrangea border at the top. Got it? Okay, so then I stripped that all off (surprise!), which was a major chore, and painted the room an awesome shade of wet-cement gray (Benjamin Moore AF-715 Dolphin). Norah's daily two-hour nap left me half an hour to take my own nap (don't judge me, I'm pregnant!), half an hour to make, eat and clean up lunch, and an hour to listen to This American Life while I worked on the room.  Progress was slow!

 

I should also mention that all the trim in the room was buttery yellow, which I painted white. It was my first stab at painting window frames, but they came out pretty well.

Here's the whole room pulled together as it is now (again, sorry for the lack of "before" shots to compare with. One of these days I'll learn to do that...)

The wall-to-wallness of the desk is awesome - we've got about 18" of additional desktop to work with and our inbox system plus the corkboard on the wall means we've been pretty good at keeping it de-cluttered.

You can see how well the desktop matches the floor here! Love that!! I need to get some cutesy stuff to fill up the bookshelf and dress up the wall shelving, so that's still on the to-do list. Overall, a huge improvement - the room looks cleaner and larger without the busy wallpaper, our desk is much more useable and the whole vibe of the room fits with our style so much better.

Next on the list is converting the upstairs spare bedroom into a shared bedroom for Norah and baby...