After: My new office/guest room!

As promised, here are the "after" pictures of my redecorated office/guest-room!

The new bookcase and organized desk, with the re-upholstered chair and fabric corkboard: 

The desk now can be used for both writing and craft projects. Instead of keeping my sewing machine out all the time, I discovered that it actually fit perfectly under my desk (yeah, that was a revelation), and I organized my supplies in little black boxes. It's much easier to find and reach things now. And why yes, there is a box devoted entirely to scissors.

One of the new items I bought was a teal and silver lamp from Home Goods, and it ended up being one of my favorite things in the room.



And here's the guest bed with the new pillows (I described how I made the pillows in an earlier post) and new framed fabric art.

Here are pictures of the room before I redecorated. 

I'm happy with what I've done so far. I've of course got a few more projects on my mind, at the same time. I'm thinking about making a teal or gray tufted headboard for the guest bed. What do you all think?

I'm also thinking about doing some kind of nice white with teal trim duvet cover (possibly by re-purposing one that I already own), and hanging up some more artwork to try to get away from that white-walls rental look.

I'd love to hear any other ideas or suggestions. What do you think makes an office a peaceful place to work?

Bookshelf organization project

The most recent project with my office/guest room was organizing everything and getting a bookshelf.

I picked up an Ikea Expedit bookcase from Craigslist, along with some coordinating boxes from Ikea. While putting random stuff into boxes may not sound like much, it did take some advance planning to figure out how to most usefully divide everything, where it should go, and what kind/size of boxes I would need.



After spending more time than I am willing to say looking for the right clock, I found the teal clock, which perfectly matched the accent color I was looking for, on the Crate&Barrel website. Even better, it was on sale and arrived at my house in no time.


The vase was the finishing touch (only $2 at the local Goodwill). I filled it with some seashells I gathered on my vacation to Florida last year. Sure, I could have easily bought some random trinket decoration vase thingy instead, but that seemed artificial and impersonal to me.

I like the sleek black look for now. Eventually, I plan to layer it a bit more, whether it's with some art on the wall over the bookshelf, putting some pretty paper on the boxes, or adding a paint trim to the bookcase (possibly teal or dark gray). What do you guys think? 

Here's what it looked like before. See all that stuff in the corner and on the bed? Most of that is now stored neatly in my new bookcase or in my desk.

Pillows project

Today's project is on making new pillowcases for my office/guest room. How about I just call it the offuest room? No? 

If you've been following my redecorations, you'll know that my last three projects have turned me into the Sheriff of the Staple Gun. Pillowcases, however, as I will reassure anyone who will stay the night in my home, do not involve any staples.

Before: These are the pillowcases I'd made a few years ago for my old apartment:

After: These are the new pillowcases in black, white, and gray fabric.

Another thing I did, which actually isn't pictured, is to make the pillows on the end two-sided. That is, I used the ring dot fabric on one side, and the reeds fabric on the other. That way, I can flip the pillows so I have two of one pattern, or one of each pattern, facing out for some variety.

Materials:
-Fabric to fit pillows, plus a few extra inches to line up the pattern and for seam allowances
-Sewing machine, needle, thread, etc.

This is one of the most basic sewing projects I can think of (Can you draw a square? Yes? You can make a pillow.).  I cut out the squares, lined them up right sides together, and sewed them up on three sides. Then I flipped them right side out, stuffed the pillow in, and stitched them shut. Someday I may put in zippers, but I didn't find it necessary at the moment.

I was left with one red squishy "moshi" pillow. I think it may have resembled something round back in college, but in the present day, it was literally an amorphous blob. This too, I measured, and I made a cylindrical roll pillow to fit. Here are some pictures during the "in progress" phase:

Making this pillow was the opposite of the square pillows; while the square ones I could have made in my sleep, the roll pillow fought against me with every inch of its shapeless being. It's a rectangle sewn into a cylinder (easy) with circles on the ends (surprisingly tricky). I must have resewn and repositioned the circles on the ends at least 3-4 times. I was just glad I kept it simple and didn't use any fancy trim or different fabrics this time. Then I flipped it inside out and poured in the filling, which is made of impossibly tiny white balls, from the other pillow. I'm expecting I will still find tiny styrofoam balls stuck to my belongings 5 years from now.

Desk chair project

The next small project I did while redecorating my office/guest room was to reupholster a chair.

In the "before" phase of this project, I had a standard desk chair on wheels, but it didn't fit neatly under my desk. As the goal was to make things organized and sleek, it had to go, so I sold it on craigslist.

I needed a chair without arms, and while I did look around on craigslist for a nice parsons chair or something of that nature, I discovered that the best option was right under my nose. Right under my dining table, in fact.

My desk chair came into my life a couple of years ago as free chairs that someone else was throwing out. I painted and reupholstered them with fabric to match my living/dining room, which I discussed a couple years ago in this post.

Here's what they looked like as my dinette chairs:

They looked OK, but I admit they were on the old-fashioned side. You can't see the fabric too well, but it was this velvet with a cut-out swirl which I really liked, but the color was boring. I had plans to get rid of the chairs, but I realized that I could keep one for my office. Total cost: $0 instead of $$ to buy a new chair.

After:

Doesn't it look much better with the black and white fabric? I wasn't sure if I would like it, but the black fabric definitely makes the ironwork "pop." Just having one chair with the fancy pattern is much less overwhelming than three of them.

Materials:
-Fabric
-Staples and staple gun
-Screws and screwdriver

It was simple: I removed the seat from the chair, lined up the fabric, and stapled it on. The trickiest part is to pleat the fabric around the rounded edges so it sits smoothly on the corners. Then I screwed the newly covered seat back into the chair.


Because of all the time I have been spending with my staple gun lately, I thought I should come up with some kind of title for myself. The first thing that came to mind was "Queen of the Staple Gun" but that sounded too staid, and "Princess Staple Gun" too precious. Then I thought perhaps "President of the Staple Gun," but no one elected me to that position and the staples were not adequately represented in this matter. So I have come up with "Sheriff of the Staple Gun," a title to connote the rugged nature of stapling, as I brandish my (staple) gun to round up those lawless fugitive staples.

Framed fabric project

Here's another simple project I did as part of re-decorating my office/guest room. These are pieces of fabric stretched over wood frames. You might recognize them from before when I had some different fabric hung up. I changed the fabric to fit my new color scheme.
 

Materials:
-Fabric hanging kit from IKEA for about $5 each
-Fabric
-Staples and staple gun

 The hardest part of this project? Picking out the fabric. I looked at so many different types of fabrics before I found some that were the appropriate scale for a wall hanging. It's easy to find great fabric--not so easy to find great fabric that is a large-scale print. The prints I saw were either too small to make good wall art or very expensive upholstery fabrics. I finally found some upholstery fabric that was about $11 a yard from an online store called Contemporary Cloth.

Once I had the fabric, all I had to do was rip off the old fabric, line up the new fabric, and staple it on. The IKEA kit came with nails (a thoughtful idea for those who don't have a staple gun), but it is much easier to staple. 

Later on, I'll post some pictures of how they looked in the room overall.

Corkboard project

Let's start with some of the simple projects. I recovered a plain corkboard to fit my black and white color scheme for the office/guest-room:


Before: Your standard-issue corkboard:

 After: Fancy new fabric corkboard:

Materials:
-Fabric to fit the board
-Staples
-Staple gun
-Picture hanging kit (or adhesive foam tape)

It takes a few minutes to make sure it's lined up on all sides. After that, it's just some  stapling. To hang it up later, I used a picture hanging kit, although I could have also used some adhesives. The great part is, I can always take the fabric off if I get tired of the look later, or replace it with a different fabric later down the road.

Before: Office/guest room

I've recently been working on revamping my office/guest room area. It was the least decorated area of my apartment and definitely needed some sprucing up.

The challenge: I use the room for not just writing and blogging, but also working on sewing and knitting projects. We also keep our office supplies and keyboard up here. And of course, since it's a guest room, we have a futon up here too. It's a lot of stuff for one tiny space! 

Before: Graveyard of random furniture and craft supplies. I wasn't using the room much because it wasn't as comfy or organized as our living room.  

After: Fortress Loft of solitude. After putting some thought and work into redecorating and organizing, I now find it calming, and I actually enjoy spending a lot of time up there. It's been a great place to work on school applications and other projects.

It's a work in progress, so I'll share some mini-projects in my next few posts and then finally the "after" photos. Without further ado, here are some "before" shots:

Before: Every inch of wall was taken up with furniture: 

Before: The desk got a little crazy:

Before/in progress: Even before I got to work on the various small projects that went into organizing and redecorating, I had to reorganize the furniture. I moved the futon and decided to keep it primarily as a bed. The decorations are from my old apartment and weren't part of the new redecorating. Other items, such as the wooden desk, I eventually got rid of, and others, like the white cube shelves, I moved to another place in the apartment.

 

Before: This is while I was in the progress of taking everything out of storage boxes and off the desk so I could later organize it all:

Before: This is once I had sorted everything into different bags and boxes so I knew where it was for later:

Before I jump into the projects in my next few posts, I'll also share some restrictions on what I could/was willing to do. We rent our place, so we of course can only do so much.

1) No major construction (obviously) - so no replacing carpet for fancy hardwood, etc.
2) No shelving or anything screwed into the wall. Other than hanging pictures, our landlord prefers that we not mount anything in the wall.
3) Lastly, I decided not to paint any walls, because we may not be here that much longer. I don't want to spend money on anything that I can't take with me or can't enjoy for a long time.

With that being said, now I'll move on to some things I did want to do. As I'm into crafts projects and re-purposing things I already have, I definitely wanted to make the most of what I already owned. Instead of buying brand new accessories and art, I decided, when possible, to use fabric and paint to make my existing stuff fit into my new decorating scheme.

Since my futon and desk were black, I decided on a neutral black, gray, and white color scheme, with teal/blues as an accent color. Here are the fabrics I picked out: