Here are the pictures that I promised of our new office. It’s my favorite room redo so far! On the wall above the door, the yellow bar goes across the top. On the opposite wall, it goes not quite halfway down the wall, and the walls that are perpendicular to that are at a slant to match up.

And check out that butcher block! So beautiful! (Can you believe it’s from IKEA?) I made the mistake of using a sponge brush, instead of a regular brush, to put on the varnish coat, so it’s a little globby in spots, but if it bothered me enough, I could always sand it down and redo it.

— Sidenote: What is a sponge brush any good for anyway? I’ve always hated them, but thought it would be nice to use so that I don’t have to clean up a varnishy brush multiple times. (I’m really bad at cleaning up anything with mineral spirits, which is one reason why I am hesitant to ever try oil painting.)–

I get so happy every time I come into this room, since it looks so nice! Sadly, I couldn’t find a good before picture, so you get to see just a picture of the border. And enlarged, it really doesn’t look so good! But it had a woodsy look to it. I also have a picture of the room while it was in-progress, with the painter’s tape masking off the sections. Nice improvement, I say!

Lately Nick and I have been busy fixing up our house to modernize it and make it our own. I already showed you our beautiful dining room. Now, we have moved on to the office.

Part of our office remodel included getting new desks. My current desk is really cute, but incredibly unstable. It’s always scary to have a drink on the desk. Just typing causes the it to wobble. It also is too small to accommodate my second monitor.

We love the butcher block look, so we went on a hunt to find some nice looking butcher block that was large enough, but not too large, and not incredibly expensive. It turns out that the butcher block at IKEA is exactly what we were looking for. I also got some cute legs there, and was so excited for my new desk. But sadly, the desk ended up being too wobbly for my tastes. So we returned the legs and went back to the drawing board.

Nick found a bunch of ideas online about building a desk using galvanized pipe. I was sold! How could piping not be incredibly sturdy? And it’s cute and lofty-looking. But this was an incredible fail for me. I did so much planning. I bought pipe and measured it and put a few pieces together to see how it fits and measured it to see how much of the length gets lost when you assemble it, and planned and priced…and failed.

When we bought the final pieces of pipe, I found out some important things that I did not know before. Pipe pieces are not all the exact same length. (I must have gotten lucky with the test pieces I bought.) Even if they are sold as ten inches, they might be a bit smaller or larger. And even though my test pipe all lost a half an inch when assembled, that does not mean that all of the pipe loses the same amount. My final product was not level, and needed too much work to get it to match exactly.

I also found out that I made my design way too complicated. I had too many connections and two rows of bars that had to screw in one direction on one side, and the opposite direction on the other side. I had found someone online who had a similar problem, and they told me to screw them in as far as you can on one side, and then unscrew them to attach the other side. This may have worked, but the quarter-inch size difference in the piping made one of the bars too loose.

I also had connections that needed to screw in to an exact placement. Which meant that the pipe was not screwed in as far as it could be, and it was wobbly and unstable…back to the drawing board!

We ended up giving up on the pipe desk and just bought stable desks that can go to sitting or standing. I’m much happier with the end result than what I think I would have been with the pipe desk, but the defeat was difficult to take. It looked so easy online…

I’ll post before and after pictures of the office next week. Stay tuned!

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. My manager is on paternity leave at work and a few people were on vacation, so I’ve been working a lot of overtime to keep the department caught up. I have basically been going to work, coming home, eating dinner, and going to bed! It’s exhausting!

So today I thought I would share with you the view from my office, since this is what I have been looking at lately. Enjoy!

A few of weeks ago, we hired some people to remove the wallpaper in our dining room and bathroom. The original plan was that I was going to do the removal, but after hours of work and a beat up wall, we decided it would be best to hire someone. Especially since we would probably have to hire someone anyway to repair the mess I made of the wall!

The plan was that the workers were going to remove the wallpaper, patch up the walls, and then prime them. Which they did, but they used a clear primer when they did it, which meant that every patched area, the pencil lines from when the wallpaper was installed, and any other wall ugliness showed through. It was pretty gross to look at! (But still nicer than the old wallpaper!)

Finally last Sunday, I couldn’t stand looking it at it anymore! So I painted. Which was both good and bad. Good because it looked much better, but bad because I only had time to paint one coat. Which meant I had to squeeze painting into my already busy schedule! But I managed to do it, and I’m so glad I did because I LOVE how the dining room looks now! Below are some before, in the middle, and after pictures. (Sorry they are not in order! I’m using the WordPress App, and I have some learning to do on how to move images around after you have imported them.)