Before and After : The Office

For the last couple of weeks I've been obsessed with getting the office together. The goal was to make it pretty and functional, instead of beige and gross; while spending as little cash money as possible.

Before:

After:

I made the desk, with help from Zach, using two doors, a small bookshelf that I already had, and two table legs. I'll expound on this project in another post.

Before:

After:

The wicker chair is from a thrift store, it was twelve buckaroos. I threw a couple of pillows that I already had on it. The yellow stool is from HomeGoods.

I didn't spend any money on the artwork. I already owned all the frames. All of the art consists of things I already had (fabric and giftwrap) or things I printed on my home printer. I used three sources for printing artwork: Vintage Printable, a disk of clipart images I had, and Dafont.com. The pear, bicycle and tree sihouettes are all Dingbat fonts I downloaded from Dafont.

The paint color is from Valspar, called Plum Passion (which is weird because it's not purple). The roman shades I made from the existing faux wood blinds that we had using Jenny's tutorial from Little Green Notebook. I was a little nervous, but they turned out okay. I think I will go back and add a liner to each of them. I used an old Ikea curtain for the fabric, and glued on black grosgain ribbon.

I replaced the black plastic pulls on the file cabinet with new brushed nickel hardware. The shelves and the containers I already had, and most of them are from Ikea. The silver wall flowers are from Target and were on clearance for about a dollar. Target and Ikea hold the answers to all of life's problems.

I eventually want to get a bigger bookshelf, but for now this one will work. I put my gift wrap in a big vase that I got forever ago, I think at Ross.