Office Redo: Update

Well, the weekend was well spent for me! I have officially decided to go with Option 3 for the office redo. After thinking about if for quite some time, I decided that I really like the symmetry of Option 3 the best, and it does seem to be very functional and condensed, keeping all of the storage in one area. It's also closer to my inspiration pictures than the other two options I posted. Option 3 allows for me to have more wall space to hang art/pictures! (Yay...because I've got a pile of prints to frame and display) It was a tough choice between the options, but in the end I realized I could move these shelves anytime I want...how awesome is that?! They're just like any other piece of furniture.

Option 3.

My Inspiration via Pinterest.
I love the corner shelves, their white finish and the contrast with the gray walls.
I don't anticipate my office shelves being this full of books, etc...but you never know.

 I spent most of Saturday morning planning and measuring for the new shelves we are making. I used the plans for floating shelves by Ana White of Ana White Homemaker, on Young House Love.  (If you don't already know Ana White and YHL, you've got to check out their blogs...they're awesome and very inspiring.)

Since my shelves are going to be 3 rows, placed adjacent to one another in a corner (6 shelves total), my plans are different from the original tutorial. I had to change all of the dimensions to meet our needs, but so far, so good. Saturday afternoon was spent buying the lumber I needed and cutting the wood to my specifications. Cutting the wood was not a fun part of this project...we cut the wood in the garage, which was about 45 degrees, and not very much light. This would have been much easier if we had a proper wood working bench and table saw to speed things along....and if we had more practice at this sort of thing. Believe it or not, this is our first building project!

The final few hours of Saturday afternoon, and Sunday afternoon were spent assembling the shelf frames and the shelf sleeves. Luckily, we brought the cut wood pieces into our basement to assemble them inside. This was so much better than the cold garage! ...a real work bench/table would have been nice here too- the card table worked just fine for now. Remember, no excuses! You don't need Bob Vila's work station to do this stuff, people!

Shelf frame.

Shelf frame with support studs.

Sleeve frame.

After all of the frames were built, I enlisted the help of our cousin, we'll call him "Red", who is light-years ahead of us in the woodworking department. Red has built his own woodworking shop in his basement (kind of like Bob Vila's). This is no ordinary basement shop...it even has a built in sawdust vacuum system! To quote Jimmie "J.J." Walker of the '70s TV show Good Times, it is most definitely "DYNO-MITE!!!" So, Red helped us out by using his table saw to cut the sheets of plywood to proper length, something that would have been very difficult, nay impossible, for us novice saw handlers to do with our circular saw in the garage.

Notice the vacuum attached to the underside of the table saw? Genius!- and probably a must-have if you have a working wood shop in the house.

Then we glued the cut plywood strips to the sleeve frames and used a huge number of clamps to secure them as the glue dries. Seriously, Red has like 1,000 clamps in his woodworking shop...now we know why.

And  that's as far as we got this weekend with the shelves & office re-do. Can't be disappointed by that! We'll resume work on the shelves next weekend, using the big boy sander (just wait till you see this thing; you won't believe it!) to make all of the sides flush and smooth, then paint and install

I hope you all had a great and productive weekend too. Thanks for checking in!

-Jess

Office Redo: Part 1

Well, this has been a crazy week...I changed to part-time work at my "real job" starting the first of January, but I have hardly been home! This is my first week of having 3 days at home, unfortunately I have been sick the whole time!! I'm starting to feel better today and want to start documenting one of my current projects....the office move. Until recently our "home office" (which consisted only of a desk, a small file cabinet, and multiple piles of papers on the floor) had been located in a spare bedroom- now that room is going to be used as an actual guest bedroom, so the office has to go. We decided the best place for it to relocate to is in an ambiguous corner of the living room:

This round card table was placed here about 3 years ago for a Halloween party. It was never meant to stay, but it quickly found a purpose...hiding the dog house and stereo. Here is how it usually looks:

Olivia patiently waiting for a treat inside the dog house.

Now, I hope to create an organized home office to neatly hide all of our office supplies and paper stuffs. This is going to be a very low budget re-do, so I'm redesigning some existing pieces I already have to make them work well together. We have a wooden desk left over from my husband's college days. (We actually painted this desk green at his parent's house the summer before his sophomore year in college...he was really into Lord of the Rings and thought this looked like a hobbit's work desk...how funny is that! ) 

This desk is getting a fresh, new coat of white satin latex paint, and a very needed coat of polyurethane for extra scratch protection. In case you are wondering, I am going to leave the stained wood top as-is. In fact, this desk is drying in the basement at this very moment : )

Here is the standard, black filing cabinet. It has already been spray painted in a white satin. I used Rustoleum Clean Metal Primer, and top-coated with 3 coats of Rustoleum Satin in white. No pictures of the finished product yet...I ran out of day light for pictures and had to bring it in without any after shots...I'll post those soon. 

A few weekends ago, it was actually warm enough outside for me to spray paint outdoors! 

Now to the real work...designing the office space! I'm in serious need of taking advantage of the vertical wall space, and in need some shelves to store books, magazine files, covered boxes, etc. I've been browsing Pinterest and my favorite blogs for ideas. I'm most inspired by these floating shelves.

Pinterest

Pinterest

 

younghouselove.com 

Before wrapping today up, here are my top 3 ideas for my floating shelf placement in my soon to be new home office (don't laugh at my hand drawn sketches! LOL) :

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

So what do you think? Let me know. I'm going to have to sleep on it before I decide. I hope to start (and finish) the shelves this weekend !!

Talk To You Later!!

-Jess