My Office Reveal! (Finally!)

I made the hard decision in the renovation to enclose the entire rest of the screened in porch and chose this corner for my future office. Fifteen months later and I moved in! You can see there on the left the ancient stained glass window that was once the front window on the house (until the screened in porch was added in 1925) it has seen better days but I was able to save it and managed to not break it during the renovation! I had high hopes and dreams for this room and was absolutely stoked when I put my furniture in it and then, this happened:

It just wasn’t working. The book case was too small and I HATED that my back was to the door when I was working. There was no way I could part with more books and there was no way that I wasn’t going to be buying more. So, I scrapped the entire idea I had previously for the Office and went back to the drawing board. First, I moved the book case you see in that picture into the closet along with my Ancient dresser for storage. I had built a really horrible shelf in the closet before and it just wasn’t working AT ALL. One thing I did love about my office though was the decision I had made during the renovation to put my modem and printer in the closet so it could be hidden out of the way – AWESOME. After that I built some serious barn wood book shelves that you guys saw in last week’s blog post: How to build easy barn wood book shelves. Anyway, without further delay, My Office Reveal!

The wood floors out here had already been painted a really brown (over at least two other colors throughout the decades) so I just decided to clean them up and repaint them. I had some leftover paint from painting my second floor so I just decided to use it on the floors out here. It is a touch blue for my taste (for a floor) but something about these floors really makes me happy and they’ve totally grown on me. The color is called Sooty Lashes by Valspar.

The ladder in the corner by the rocking chair was what I had leftover when I cut the ladder down that I’m using upstairs in my Master closet. I think I may hang it up on the wall eventually. My dreams for this office were simple, I wanted lots and lots a book storage and a large enough work space that two people could sit across from each other and work without getting into each other’s way. The truth is I just dream in flat empty surfaces, I drool over craft rooms on Pinterest that offer big work tables.

I needed a place for my English saddles so I ran out to the barn and grabbed an old box my grandparents’ had made to catch saw dust under their table saw. I cleaned it up and put a coat of poly over it and viola! It also offers some extra storage. Is it kind of weird I have horse tack in my office? Yeah, I guess, but anyone who owns saddles (or leather anything) knows that a damp environment will destroy them and my barn is just not dry enough. So, they have a home in my office. (And there is a perk to having them in here too that no one else has seemed to have noticed but me – they smell like my horses! So, every day I work in the office there’s just the lightest most wonderful smell of horse in here that I just love!) The curtains are from my childhood (I believe I picked them out when I was about 14) I decided to nix the idea of curtains on the windows so I went to walmart and just bought a little white valance to go across the tops of each and then used my big curtains as closet doors. Have a great day guys, if you enjoyed My Office Reveal consider heading over to the blog and see a lot more pictures!