Office Redo: Color Explosion!

By Elle

When deciding how to redo the office, my only requirement was that it be bright,  colorful and cheery. No dark, studious space for me.

As you can see from the “before” photos, the room had been painted salmon, and dark curtains covered the windows. We ended up keeping the dark brown carpeting for now, but the plan is to eventually replace it with cork flooring.

Check out our before and after photos and let us know what you think!

 

Before. As you can see, the room is tiny, and we wanted to make it as bright and airy as possible.

Before. The space looked like a dreary home office — nowhere I’d like to spend a significant length of time. The three windows, however, are an asset we wanted to take advantage of.

After! Bright and cheery, just the way I wanted it. (Even though the printer is on the floor….)

The one piece we needed in the office was a bookcase. Found the perfect specimen at our fave store — Antique and Craft Co-op in Painesville — for about $60. I immediately wanted to update the hardware to give it less of a ’70s look. (I’d removed the hardware on the lower right for measurement purposes.)

I spray painted the existing hardware with Rustoleum Multicolor Textured spray paint in Caribbean Sand.

I kept the large metal backers but replaced the old pulls with new ones from Lowe’s.

Ta da! The finished product. We’d considered painting the entire bookcase, but the wood is in great shape, and I rather like how it looks. I especially love how the wall color peeks through the open back.

We painted the walls and ceiling Guilford Green, Benjamin Moore’s color of the year for 2015. The inside of the window seat is painted a much deeper green, Dried Thyme from Sherwin-Williams, though it’s often hard to tell the difference because of the lighting.

Bought these pillows from Plow & Hearth and Lowe’s with the intention of using them with my new pallet furniture (the topic of a future post!), but they look so dang great on the window seat.

I reckon the pillows will spend their summer days outdoors on the pallet furniture and the winters indoors, right here.

Enough said!

Found this alpaca rug on Craigslist for $40. I love walking into the office and giving my feet a little alpaca love. (If you’ve ever felt alpaca fur, you know what I mean.)

We already had the Ekornes chair — it’s actually about 20 years old. (The black and white photo of us in the background hasn’t found its permanent home yet.)

Nothing like some silk Gerbera daisies to brighten up a space!

All the artwork in the office are photos that we took on our trip to Italy last year.

Even though space is tight, I wanted some live plants. I just need to find the perfect plant stand for the croton.

I love using metallic accents, especially to make a room look larger. In this case, my metallic accents are only a lamp and a family photo tree that Abby bought for me in, oh, 2012. Just last month, I finally got around to replacing the strangers’ faces with faces of people I actually know. Hurray for progress!

Bought four of these cute and colorful metal hooks from World Market ($2 each) originally to use in my closet, but they just seem to fit in the office. (Side note: Abby’s two-year-old picked them up and exclaimed, “Earrings!”)

I use two of the hooks on each side of the window seat to hold the cords from the bright white roman shades, which offer the perfect combo of light and privacy, not to mention a clean look.

The other two hooks hold scissors (keeps them out of the hands of little ones) and cords. Bought the fun bulletin boards at Pat Catan’s.

I LOVE Día de Muertos, so when I saw this switchplate at the Cain Park Arts Festival, I had to have it. My man thought it was perfect, too: “It’s for your office, where you work yourself to death.” Funny guy.

These framed photos of us from our trip to Italy weren’t colorful enough to make the main walls.

So I centered the two photos above the bookcase.

I tried to hide all the junk next to the bookcase and gussy up the space with a photo collage/shelf and whimsical chalkboard.

Color. It makes us happy. 🙂