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.




The EXPEDIT bookshelf from IKEA is one of my favorite products - so much storage!

The desk chair I also got at a thrift store for $15. It was in pretty good shape so I just recovered the upholstery with some fabric from Joann's.



And there you have it, my new office! When all was said and done I spent about $200 benjamins.