Our Home Office: The "During" Phase.

Guy and I have been good little worker bees this weekend. We spent most of Friday and Saturday working in the home office. It's really the second bedroom of our little cape cod. We moved in, refinished the floors, threw a rug down, and cobbled together a desk that ran flush against 2 walls in the room. The layout of the desk is fantastic. It gives us a ton of useable space (really, enough for 3 full sized desktop computers, plus random network gadgets, and a printer) but we constructed it out of inexpensive pine. It's been sitting here, albeit serving the purpose it was put together for, looking naked and quite unfinished for a year now.


We liked Benjamin Moore's Davenport Tan pretty early on, and we ended up going with it. With our paint color finally chosen, we put up a new Hunter fan to replace the 10-year-old brass one that was up when we moved in.

The existing color in the office could be described as very light yellow-brown. And it was FILTHY. Even after a hard scrubbing it still looked dingy. Painting was a no-brainer but the desk surface took a little more thinking. The wood is cheap and uneven in spots, plus it's two pieces mended together. I wanted a white surface and one that will hold up to a LOT of use. Paint wasn't really on my list.

Here's some "before" shots of the office. I don't have a lot because it was so ugly it brought shame upon my entire family.

So retro, so grimey

What kind of Aunt makes their niece clean their house? *ME ME I DO*

The picture from the real estate listing. Notice the carpet.

Eek! I barely remember the wall-to-wall carpet in this place! And the photo from the real estate listing makes it look not-quite-filthy. For reference, that corner is the same one my niecey is standing in holding her broom. Yeah.

Now, we aren't quite finished with the office, but I have some nice in-progress shots, the walls are painted and the desk surface down, and I'm very excited because now all we have to do is some detail work!

Benjamin Moore Davenport Tan in a small office

Coat number 1

Desk grommets! I love these!

How did I do my pretty white desk? Come back and I'll tell ya!

Like I said, just details now, and I hope to have the grand unveiling before the month is out. One or two more trips to the Home Depot ought to do the trick.

I have a few tricks I'm employing to keep things neat, and I plan to share how I did it here pretty soon. 

I almost forgot, Marley was wonderful, she really held it together during us emptying everything out of the office, the vacuum and drill running, etc.

Just kidding!

whatareyoudoing

NO

Little Cape Guest Spot: Euclid Boo!

So I have a nifty little thing we came across tonight, but it didn't happen at the Little Cape, but rather my mom's house, Boo!

Guy and I lived at Boo for years, and we painted quite a bit of it, along with numerous other upgrades during our stay. The walls always had a weird thickness to them and the paint was cracked, and I mean cracked... like crazy... all over.

It went through a few looks while we lived there, here's a very brief visual history of Ninny's dining room:

Boo's Dining Room in white - move in day

In purple, with light purple trim and builtin. Ack.

Dining room in stripes Gingerbread removed from built-in

I loved the stripes, but they ended up being painted over with an incredibly neutral light tan. Long story. We also pried the gingerbread trim off, as you can see.

Guy's parents are giving my mom a set of beautiful corner cabinets, so naturally my mom wanted the very builders-grade, old built in to go. As we started to pry the wood from the walls tonight, we found something that surprised me - paint underneath! I thought the built-in was original to the house... guess not!

We pulled more out, and it was when we removed the middle shelf that I saw a strip of wallpaper.

So of course, we slowly tear off some paint that gives easily, and next thing you know, we can make out that under the numerous but expected layers of paint, there are THREE layers of wallpaper!

What happens next? We stripped the entire room! My husband, me, my brother, his girlfriend, we're in there stripping... err, well you know.

This wallpaper is definitely from the 1940's. I didn't get any good photos of the one layer of paper under IT, which I'd peg as original to the dining room. House was built in 1941. Neat!!

Just peeling paint with our fingers!

Totes cray, right?!?

The insanity goes on, remember how I said the walls up and down were cracking, splitting, and sagging? Turns out the once upon a timers wallpapered EVERYTHING (even DOORWAYS that don't have wood trim)! So we're going to strip everything off (with just our hands, it literally peels off) and go to town!

Do I sound excited? I kinda am. Why?

House history = porn for me and,
The walls have looked bad for years and we never knew why.

I'm kind of surprised the freaking paint stayed up this long. Maybe one more coat would have been the back-breaking straw, ya think?