Meet Our New Office

Today is the last day of the new home tour...for now. We still have one room to complete, so when it is finished, I'll come back and show that one to you as well!

Today's room is one of my very favorites, and yet as I took pictures, it feels like one of the least complete. I guess I shouldn't say "least complete" as much as I should say it's the one with the most room for continued growth.

It's my/our office.

I realized {sadly} that I did not have a blog post covering the office at our old house. Boo!!! Oh well. Our old office was probably the most cramped room in our entire house. It was a bedroom that at one time had been fairly large, but over the years grew a bit smaller when a closet and a bathroom were added, cutting into the square footage of the room. Though the office is primarily mine, since I'm the writer of the family, Ryan and I do like to share it, and whenever possible, we like to work in there at the same time. So it was a pretty cramped space.

Because of that, I am so excited about our new office!

Let me show you what it looked like when we moved in:

Do you recognize that bookcase up there? That's the one we moved into our master bedroom! We also took down the TV that was hanging on the wall. And then there's the wallpaper border. Again. It could NOT come down without a fight. This was the final wallpaper removal of the adventure for me, and by the end, Ryan had to step in and rescue me. I could not handle one more shred of wallpaper.

YES!!!!!!!!!! It is DONE!!!!!!

At our old house, we had one room {that was, for a time my bedroom, then my office and then our workout space} that was bright yellow. I really liked it. It was cheery and inspiring, and I wanted to have that back. So I picked out a color called Iced Tea {because iced tea is bright yellow???} and put it on the walls. Ryan kind of kidded me about it when I put it up because it was HELLO bright.

And it was. It really was. Once we started filling the room, it toned it down, but if I wanted bright and cheery, I sure did get it with this color!

I painted this room by myself and had to go over it twice, because even though the paint color before was neutral, the area under the border was white, and it showed through the yellow paint. I adore painting but I have to confess, by the time I was done with this room, I was kind of tired of painting. {Shhhh. Don't tell!!!}

Several years ago, before Ryan, I realized my book collection had begun to overflow my shelves. {Notice I did not say it had grown too large.} My dad was kind enough to custom build two massive shelves for me, and Ryan wanted me to still have them in the new house. So the week we moved all our stuff out of the Marion house, he carefully labeled every piece and took it apart so we could move the shelves to the new house.

 You may notice I had never painted them! So when they were all taken apart, we made all these makeshift sawhorses in the garage, using the biggest empty boxes we had from the move, and for a couple of days I painted and flipped them, painted and flipped them.

And then we put them back up!!

And then I dove into filling the shelves and organizing the office. I was delirious with joy. Organizing this was, for me, the same joy that organizing the garage was for Ryan. He said he had never seen me "in the zone" like I was the day I organized this.

Ready for the after shots?

And your side-by-side comparisons. Click to enlarge.

So here's what we did: Left the carpet alone, ripped down the border,, painted the walls Iced Tea {Valspar, Lowe's}, painted our previous bookshelves white and reassembled them in this room, and moved in! I think this room has the shortest work list and had the most boxes to put inside it!!

In the last picture above, you can see the little rectangle table, which is where we now do our podcasts each week. In our old office, that was also our shared desk. It was a TIGHT space. We wanted to make it the dedicated podcasting space and get something bigger for our desk. But tables are expensive, and we didn't want to spend a lot of {or any...let's be truthful!} money. After we decided we couldn't use our dining room table in our great room area, I asked Ryan if he thought it MIGHT fit in this room as our desk. We tried it and it worked!

We were so grateful to get to use it, since it's a piece of furniture that comes from Ryan's side of the family, AND because we already owned it, so it was FREE!!! I love having so much space to use when I write, and it's so nice when we work there together!

I love my metal perpetual calendar! I bought it on clearance at Kohl's back when I worked at the station, and it was on my desk there. Obviously I haven't started using it to keep track of our calendar yet, but I love having it up! And we got the white board to store things that might normally go on a refrigerator so we can keep that space clutter free. So this is our little organizing area. We love it!

Red Letter Words art that my best friend, Lynnette, gave me for my birthday a couple of years ago. I adore Red Letter Words, and I was so excited to get that. I feel like it's a perfect encouragement in my writing space! Above it, my "Nevertheless" art piece based on a lesson I learned from reading Angie Smith's book, What Women Fear. {Explanation of the Nevertheless piece found here.}

One of my favorite collections. The black and white Footprints piece was my going away gift from my co-workers in the Financial Aid Office when I left in 2011. They chose it because they had just watched me walk through my desert season of life and felt it best represented my faith. {I love that!!} Every single one of them wrote me a message on the back, and I treasure this! The Proverbs 31 art was my gift from Ryan on my last day of work at WBCL, and he said he felt it represented my faith as I stepped into the unknown. {I love that!!} The station gave me a card that everyone had signed, so I attached it to the back, giving me two pieces of art signed by all my co-workers. The picture underneath the Footprints piece is a picture of Ryan and me from our first photo shoot when we were dating. He added words to it and framed it for me - a gift for my desk at work. So this whole collection is very meaningful for me.

Be. Still. My. Beating. Heart. How I love all my books. Every one of them. I know them all and always know exactly which ones are missing/loaned out. This makes my heart so happy.

So the room is done/complete for now, but I love it that there's room to grow and mature and settle as a writer in here. Room for more books. Room for more art. Room for more memories.

UPDATE!!!!! Our cat's ONE form of anger when we uprooted her from her home and moved her into our new house was to christen the closet in the office...every square inch of it. Because of that, we were forced to EMPTY this entire room and replace the flooring. We went with wood laminate, and the final FINAL after pictures are here!

Hope you've enjoyed the house tour this week! When we finish the guest room, I'll let you see that one! :)

PS - renovation takes so much longer than the one hour it takes the HGTV folks I watch all the time. ;)