The Office: Start to Finish

This is how the office began, and roughly how it stayed for almost a year. Then we decided to paint all the rooms upstairs.

At this point, it was still the guest room. By "guest room" I mean a futon, a couple dressers with our extra clothes and electronics, and the elliptical.

I took only two pictures at this stage, but it stayed like this for a year or so. It was functional, but not excellent. Once we got rid of the elliptical, we moved the desk to where it was and moved in a chair that hand been floating from room to room downstairs. We added more bookshelves, floor lamps, curtains, and wall art for the final look.

Even though the layout changed a lot, the only real renovating in this room was paint!

Office

After switching the office to its new room, we got rid of a red chair from Aaron's apartment and replaced it with one that folded out into a sleeper. We also got a way smaller desk, as the other one mostly collected junk and was never used. I believe the new one was a gift from my mom, from Target. The mirror there was waiting to find a purpose, as we had replaced it with one from Garden Ridge. We eventually hung it in the living room. A big ugly elliptical is located on the other side of this room. There's also a bookshelf behind the desk.

I despised the elliptical, because it was large, expensive, and not used enough to justify it's encumbrance on our home. There was never a good place to put it. The layout here is meant to initially detract from the elliptical, since you couldn't see it when you looked into the room from the hall. I later used the same layout to "hide" the desk.

Painting Upstairs

We painted the kitchen and downstairs bathrooms soon after moving in, as well as the dining room, which would go on to be painted three times. But upstairs, we mostly did in one trip to the hardware store. This was a project from late 2010, after the lost year of film. We bought all this paint (and PowerAde) at once, much to the amusement of Matt the paint clerk at Home Depot. I can also say that at this point, the dining room had been painted twice, because the yellow of this hallway was the first color. It looked horrible, I thought, and went for something softer. The cans shown here are all Behr Paint and Primer in One. The yellow paint on the wall was not, and it was that annoying experience that lead me to try something different.

There used to be a Menards and Home Depot practically side by side three minutes from my house. A little before we began this project, the Menards closed. I spent a good deal of money at their store closing sale, knowing there was so much I could stock up on for the house. Most of these painting supplies came from Menards, allowing me to start this project more organized than ever. At this time, the bedroom with the big closet was the guest room, and the bedroom next to the loft was the office. This was a bad choice for many reasons. I believe that moving everything for the paint made us realize we should switch the rooms.

The Behr paint was amazing. Our walls had never been painted and were scuffed and stained in many places. The paint covered in one coat, and with less paint than we expected. If you buy anything cheaper, you waste your savings by needing more paint, primer, and time. That said, the rooms were painted quickly! I lost picture taking steam as the project continued.

As a side-note, since that dresser is in the office, we must have bought dressers for our bedroom at this point. They were super cheap ones that we got from Target on clearance, and sucked. They were always falling apart and weren't anything like real furniture. We kept them for a little while though, until we could afford new ones from Ikea, and gave the old ones to a friend moving into his first apartment.