DIY Office Makeover

So it appears I have neglected my blog since my birthday.  I’ve thought about it a lot and I’ve told myself that I need to blog about a few particular things but when I have any time to sit, I do it because I have been a BUSY woman!  One thing I had thought a lot about is my follow-up on my 30 before 30 post and I will still probably do that, just a few months after I turned 30. 🙂  Another post I’ve been meaning to do is a post with pictures of our new house.  When my mother-in-law was here visiting I started making Kylee’s quilt for her bed so I had material everywhere.  When she was getting ready to go she pulls out her camera and starts taking pictures of my disastrous house because she said relatives were asking to see the house.  So I got her to stop with the promise of posting pictures, and I will come through on that promise… eventually 🙂  One of the hold ups for that post is actually that I had one wreck of a room that I was completely embarrassed to show and that was my office.  So when we got back from Nebraska I decided to get on it!

It took me about 3 weeks mainly working on the weekends to get everything done, and considering I made almost everything that went into the room, I think 3 weeks is pretty quick!  Before we get started, let’s show everyone the dreaded BEFORE pictures.

In Farmington we had 2 desks in our office, one for Kyle’s computer and one for mine and neither of them were nice and probably wouldn’t have made it to Texas in tact so we donated them.  When we got here I had to work, so I used our white foldout table to temporarily work on.  As you can see I also had a couple of boxes that hadn’t been unpacked because I had no where in the office to put the stuff.  The room also has to have a play area for Kylee because most of the time she wants to be in the same room as me, so in order to get any work done there HAS to be stuff to keep her entertained.

Here is the after picture… As you may or may not be able to tell, I went with a shabby chic theme and I LOVE how it turned out!!!

The first thing I did was start building the desk.  Yes, I built that!  I’ll do another post with specifics on how I did it but I’ll give you a quick run down.  First I built the top using pallet slats, put a border around it, and filled it with epoxy.  The epoxy took one whole weekend itself.  The next thing was to build the cabinets which I have to give a lot of credit to my dad for that one!  The space and quality is awesome and it has everything to do with his designing them (and helping me build them of course).  The last step was painting which was several steps.  Since I did shabby chic, I needed the desk to look weathered (somewhat).  So I did a coat of brown, did faux scratches with a cream paint, drew on the antique label on the side, and used Annie Sloan’s dark soft wax to give it the aged look (yes, it’s supposed to look dirty).

Here is a closer look at the desk…

I have 4 drawers in the cabinet on the left and the cabinet on the right has 2 slide out shelves inside, one close to the top to hold paper and one on the bottom to hold my printer.

This is Kylee’s area.  I painted the back of the cabinet with chalkboard paint so Kylee could color on it, I bought Kylee’s desk at the antique show I went to last month along with the window frame that I painted to match my color scheme.  Then I built a toy box out of left over pallet slats to match the room and get rid of the ugly, cheap green one from Target.  I LOVE that it looks like an old crate.  If you are going to make a toy box out of pallets MAKE SURE to sand it VERY well!  I lost count of how many pieces of sand paper I went through to get it sanded down enough.  To get the distressed look in the front and back, I just used a dry brush painting technique so the paint didn’t get down in the grooves.

The shelf is just a shelf kit from Lowes that I painted to look distressed.  I do plan on slowly adding other shabby chic items up there, slowly but surely.  The old sewing machine and lantern I got at the antique show in Roundtop as well.

This is one of the last things I created for the room.  I bought the frame as it is in Roundtop, put fabric around a piece of cardboard to fill the frame and created the flower with pages from an old book cut into petals and hot glued onto a round piece of cardboard.

So that’s it, my new office!  The grand total for the whole makeover was $825.  The desk ended up being more than I expected and a majority of the sum at $605.  Half of that was the epoxy; since I had to order it I also had to pay $50 for shipping.  Paint and wax cost me $110 and all the accessories cost me another $110.  I still plan on painting the book shelf from the before picture and making a couple of little boxes from pallets to use as storage on the book shelf.