Office Space

A momentous thing (for us) happened over the last week. A glorious, wondrous, delightful thing. It involves our office. And paint. And floors. But let me begin...(cue dramatic voice)...at the BEGINNING.

I'm sure you all remember every detail of our cozy little shared office room, but in case you didn't, here is the heavily filtered version of things before all my wall decor started falling off, WHICH, by the way, I don't understand. The tape method is usually so secure.

I didn't really mind my corner, actually. It was kind of crazy but it was warm and crafty. However, most of the stuff on the walls was there because I didn't have anywhere else to put it. That wall was my junk drawer. The majority of the art was meaningless stuff that I'd printed out to fill up empty spaces. It was all nice, but it wasn't what I wished of my writing/playing/relaxing space.

Joe has a desk in there too, but we do not speak of it.

Another key factor to this room was that it was the only one left with orange-brown-peach paint. The walls, ceiling and sometimes the baseboards in our living room, bedroom and hallway had all been that weird peach. We didn't mind at first, but over time we began to loathe it more and more. The office started to fill me with inexplicable, squinty-eyed fury.

So we finally got off our lazy bums and changed it!

preparing for the paint

this is the more accurate example of the peach paint

 Around the time that we moved the furniture to the middle of the room and covered half of it in drop cloths, we decided, "Hey, why not rip out the carpet in hopes that there are hardwood floors underneath?" It had worked in the living room, which is a good enough reason to suspect it would work everywhere else.

Directly under the carpet was this magic:

GAZE UPON THE WONDER

 Which I swear to you I actually considered for about two seconds before realizing that was the worst idea in the world.

We got a bit worried thinking that this was it. This was the floor, and we'd destroyed the carpet and now we'd have to live with clown vomit linoleum because we're poor and hasty.

But it turned out not to be linoleum at all. It was some weird, thick carpet underlay stuff that was conveniently rip-able. And in fact....

Underneath it lay dusty hardwood flooring! Unfinished and in remarkably good shape, mostly.

VICTORY

There was a little bit of water damage under the window, which you can kind of see in the next picture, but I think it's pretty shallow and we should be able to get it fixed up whenever we finish the floors in the future. Other than that we were really pleased with what was hiding under the beautiful multi-colored monstrosity.

You can kind of see, too, that someone once stained the edges around the room. With actual wood stain, on purpose. Still trying to understand why.

With the carpet taken care of, we resumed painting the room. Just white. Lovely, bright, boring white.

second coat

The last of the peach IN THE WHOLE HOUSE. It's a mark of how glad I was to be rid of it that I remembered to take a picture of the occasion.

 Here's the office put back together the next morning! Bright and happy.

With special guest, angsty Buffy Summers! 

Gus loves the new wood floors. 

 And last Thursday I figured out my art and got it all hung up. The top right painting is a place filler, but everything else was picked out because I loved it or it makes me happy (except the bulletin board. That's just convenient.)

And Joe hung his own art on his side, so there's proof that he uses this room too.

I love it in here now, especially during the day when the sun streams in. 

 So... did I make it worse? Anyone think the peach was better? I'm so happy with the changes, it feels a lot more purposeful and interesting to me now. The reduced clutter on the walls is helpful too. I'm going to do something to hide the cords behind my desk but other than that and some organization of craft stuff on the wall behind my desk, this room is all set.  I'm so glad we finally put in the effort to get this done!

Room Update

Short post. Got some curtains and summer bed trimmings... so we updated our bedroom. It's also been painted and pictures have been hung! And the furniture was moved around a bit...

And so it shall stay for now. I find it soft and welcoming and honestly don't know what else to do to it for the moment.

And that's all! Soon I'll put up pictures of our backyard since it's been growing in, and our garden. It's so green and gorgeous! And if anything of actual excitement happens, that may also be reported. It remains to be seeeen. Mystery. Intrigue. That is what we thrive on here.

A-door-able Springtime!

Get it?! Because there will be doors in this post. Ha!

Winter was a doldrumy time around the Galloway household. Something about the dull grey skies, the lack of greenery, and having to wear sweaters even when sunshine occasionally exists makes the thought of doing any kind of project really unappealing. But spring's been peeking her pretty little head around the corner, so Joe and I went on a kind of mad dash of projects over the last few weeks. We were building, sanding, measuring fiends!

And now is the time when I show off all we have done.

First, our back door used to not be a door. We had one in our kitchen that closed off the laundry/cat room, but the door that led outside was just a storm door that didn't keep in much warmth or...security. So last summer (fall? ehhn) we found a guy selling cool older doors on KSL, and one of them happened to look almost identical to the one in our kitchen. The only difference was that the window was a little bigger. BUMMER.
Just kidding. That's a totally awesome problem to have. I love light!
So we bought the door and brought it home and got all gung-ho to change it out...and then it sat in our shanty for months and months. And more months. Untiiiillll....

Joe got to know his circular saw! That doorway in incredibly wonky, which is to say none of the corners are square. So he had a great time cutting down the sides and ends of the door, holding it up, realizing it didn't fit, doing it all again with new measurements, finding this side or that was still too long....
I should say he had a great time at first. But after the fourth or fifth time remeasuring and re-slicing-off-a-tiny-sliver-of-door he would have probably been okay with just being done.

The shanty makes a brief but glamorous appearance.

 And while he was doing that, I was doing....this!

Our original living room coffee table was taken for free from our neighbor's curb. Literally, the house next door. You can only understand how shamefully cheap that feels when you do it yourself, hoping all along that they aren't watching you drag their old, crayon-marked beast into your front door.
It was a great table but it had never been properly finished, so every time we "cleaned" it we'd take off the dust and what appeared to be several layers of the paint. It was also much bulkier than I would have liked. So when we found this table on...you guessed it...KSL, we snatched it up and I immediately took it outside for a sanding. The original wood stain was an okay color but it was covered in paint splotches and scratches and just really needed to be refinished.

I sanded it down to the bare wood on the top for staining, but just did a light sanding on the legs as I planned on painting those.

Also I cheated and didn't touch the bottom of the top piece at all. And then painted all over that sucker around the legs. So the bottom is ugly. Just don't look.

And here's the finished table in our living room! It's the same height and 3 inches longer than our last table, but a good 5 inches less wide. I was surprised by how much wimpier it looked when we first made the switch but it's grown on me. 

Huh. Lots of pattern going on in that room, Tara. 

Our next project was to replace the console under our TV with something a little more substantial to fill out the wall. I took pictures of this process....somewhere....

But I don't know where they are. So instead you get the finished product and you can imagine that we just magicked it there like Harry and Ginny would have. Or Ron and Hermione, if you're more in that camp. 

Oh man. I love it. 

And THEN...we built a fence. A REAL ONE! We needed a better garden fence to keep Magnus out, so that we could grow more than peppers and tomatoes this year and hopefully avoid any further chicken casualties. 

It also safely corrals our yard junk.

And then we thought, hey, a yard that looked nice would be lovely. So we built a dog run too, to keep the dogs from tearing any more holes in our once picturesque backyard. Fortunately our yard was a decent enough size that we were able to give them a fairly roomy dog run and still have a lot of backyard left over. And we still let them out daily to get their zoomies out, so they're suffering no loss. Not that they feel that way....

Dear diary. The fence continues to vex me. The authorities persist in taunting me with
their lack of response to my incredibly sad puppy face. This is my 800th attempt
 to reach them by squeezing through the wooden slats, to no avail. I will not give up. 

 I almost cropped out the nasty, nasty looking yard, but I figured it would be a good example of why we made the run. The rest of the yard is worse. But we shall make it beautiful this summer! BEAUTIFUL!

We do not understand this undue cruelty.  We are betrayed.

We are so pleased with how adorable it is, especially in the corner by the plum tree where it meets the garden. So quaint! I can't wait until the leaves all come in and it is fresh and summery. And the fence will be painted white, so that'll be extra domestic. 

Aaaaand the last project, which we completed just last weekend, are these dog doors that lead from the house, into the shanty, and thence to the dog run. This way they can get out whenever they want and it is SO NICE. Dog doors for gigantic dogs (ahem, Magnus) are really expensive, so Joe just built some of his own using 2x4s and plastic sheets that are normally used for the mats under your office chairs. It worked out really well and the dogs picked up on it immediately, so we're very pleased.

From the house into the shanty...

...and from the shanty to the yard!

We put a trim frame on the dog door inside the house, and will paint it and make it look nice. We tried to do a similar thing in the shanty, as you can see from the photo above, but we had a somewhat disastrous experience with the wood glue and then ran out of trim. So that was fun. Now it looks really special but...who cares! It functions.

Next on the list is planting the garden, putting in bushes and flowers in the front and back yards, and painting the office and rehanging all the pictures in a gallery wall above my desk. We'd also like to do something about the carpet in there, but there's a weirdly colorful linoleum or something underneath so it might take some creativity. Other projects in the "maybe soon" list are painting the concrete floor in the laundry room, painting the kitchen cabinets and walls, building a kitchen table, and putting shelves in our shelf-less office closet. So basically we could just keep going forever. But we love doing it and it's always so nice to sit and admire our hard work afterward :)

In some last minute, unrelated news, I am working on a couple of books right now. As in writing them. It is really fun and exciting to finally be working on the thing that I've always wanted to do. I get a little discouraged sometimes, wondering why I took so long to try it and feeling a bit behind, but after seeing what I can accomplish I feel pretty confident that I will only improve and will learn all the tricks to becoming a bonafide author. And I'm telling you because that's what I do to keep myself accountable. If any of my work is someday on bookstore shelves (or e-reader shelves, as the case may be) then you can look back at this as the moment I decided I would make it happen. So you should probably feel pretty special about that ;)

Here's a quote!

"Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and the thrill of creative effort."

Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

The Bedroom That Will Be

You may have noticed that I have recently become a woman (semi)obsessed when it comes to crafts, DIY projects, and home decor. The living room has had most of the focus since moving in because it was plain and is the room most people see. But next on the agenda is most likely our bedroom. OooOOoo. I have a few ideas of what I'd like to do in there, mostly involving some light grey walls, fun detail decor and maybe a change of bedding to go better with the plan. We'll see. But I wanted to make a post of inspiration pictures, and hopefully after all is done I can compare the two and see some mystifying similarities between my new in-home retreat and the rooms that inspired me (....and Joe. He cares too. Sort of).

By the way, if you too are bedazzled by the pictures below and want to add them to your "someday this will be MINE MWAHAHAH" Pinterest board, please pin them from the original source that I link and not from my blog....since I have nothing to do with them. Yes? Yes. I would just remove the nifty little "pin it" link from the photos but...I don't know how. Sigh. Confessions, confessions.

I first realized that light grey walls were my heart's desire after seeing these pics on a couple of my favorite blogs:

Work in progress photo from The Lettered Cottage.
It's so light and airy! I love it.

Gallery wall from Young House Love. Such a
great home "makeover" blog, I love basically
everything they do. Ever. Including this amazing
gallery wall. Seriously, go look at the post on how
they put it together. Uh, brilliant! 

This is another from Young House Love. I'm thinking
a darker grey accent wall behind our bed, maybe
with a stenciled pattern over it, would be quite fun.

A stencil like this, for example. From Cutting Edge Stencils.

And I just found this one on Pinterest, and traced it back to
this tumblr. No idea if that's the original source
(probably not) but I tried. I like the white/grey bedding,
fresh and lurvly. And the walls, of course.

Love the shades of brown in this one, too.
From Blissful Blog.

I also found some cute...what would you call it..."his" and "hers" silhouette graphics at thegraphicsfairy.com (so great for free art to print out for your boring old bare walls...ok my boring walls) and I'd like to get those made rather large and put them over our nightstands or in some other empty space for some added quirkiness.

Anyway I think you get the idea. I'm hoping this will be sort of a summer project for us.... and that we can do it all for pretty much no cost. As no major changes are being made I feel this is quite doable. Here is our room right now, by the way (in case my multiple picture postings have faded from your memory or you have forgotten from lack of interest...you're not getting off that easy!):

Stencil wall? Hmm?

Curtains of some sort shall be crafted!

All black accessories. Hooray for matching anything!

To end, here's a list of things to do:

    -Paint walls light grey

    -possibly stencil one wall that may or may not be a darker grey

    -make curtains or buy them for a ridiculously good price (probably white)

    -art for the walls

    -new bedsheets/pillow cases (?)

    -find lamps for the side tables

    -replace doorknobs on closets and patch holes on weird top cupboard closet (we replaced that hardware            last year)

Fun! Can't wait to get started. :)