pulling it all together

the day had finally arrived to cross our fingers, toes, and eyes, and hope that all the many measurements were right and that the desk as we envisioned it would actually come together.

- we had purchased the ikea butcher block and managed to stuff it into the car to get it home

- ross had cut two identical halves and stained/polyed them

- ross and danny had made our shelving sketch into reality

- dad had primed and painted every nook and cranny of the shelves

- ross and i picked out drawer hardware, a decorative table leg to act as a support, and some metal brackets to join the two pieces together

now we just had to put it all together.

first, the room had to be almost completely cleared

and then it got a nice thorough scrubbing

just to keep it real:  the house pretty much looked like this the entire weekend, but we all dealt with it, knowing it would all come together in the end

finally, the shelving gets to move into its forever home.

enter the first two roadblocks:  addressing the floor vent on the right that got halfway obstructed by the shelf…

and then shimming up the unlevelness of the shelf created by our ever so quaint, yet ever so crooked house.  it was off by half an inch, yikes!

but finally, it was time to bring in the desk top

it fits!!

then dad and ross started strategizing about how to join the two slabs together and mount the leg support in the center

which turned into a lengthy process of drilling, screwing, brackets, sawdust, and a few broken screws

but finally!  she’s in and set up.

enter 3rd roadblock of the day:  there’s only one plug in the room.  thankfully, both of our surge protectors had cords long enough to plug into the wall and then be strategically placed in front of each of our workstations (ross is on the left and i’m on the right).  it was overwhelming the amount of cords we have!

and a few days later after we got some artwork up on the walls:

we’re so proud of this project – it was by no means an easy one, but after lots and lots of planning and lots and lots of help, we gotter done.  as you can see, it gives us plenty of “office” space while leaving a lot of the room open for our posh air mattress to be brought in and convert the whole room into a guest bedroom at a moment’s notice.  the next time we have guests over, i’ll try to document how everything gets set up and the few little hidden tweaks i’ve made to create a nice bedroomy feel.  at the mother’s insistence, we’re also considering a nice area rug to go into this space too, but that will come later.

thanks for following the evolution of our latest house project.  next up, the domino effect that started in our one full bathroom.  and then:  the nursery reveal!!

 

the rest of the office transformation story: 1, and 2

calling in the experts

i’m back with more info on the study transformation.

so to refresh our memories:  this was the vision.  but how to go about the implementation?

ross and i did some research runs at home depot and lowe’s, thinking that the top surface of the desk could just be a slab of wood that we stained and installed.  but a piece of these dimensions (10ft x 2ft) just didn’t exist.  and after a long talk with the countertop department at home depot, a slab of butcher block would set us back as much $1200.  SO not in the budget.

back to the drawing board.

enter the wonderful world of ikea.  their butcher block countertops were gloriously cheaper and fit right into our budget.  the only setback was that their longest slab was 96 inches and we needed ~119.  meaning we’d have to buy two slabs and then cut each into two equal halves.  not a huge problem, it just required some creativity to join and then support the middle seam.  more on that solution in a later post.

the second challenge involved finding two end supports that had to meet a lot of criteria:

- sturdy enough to hold the weight of the butcher block + whatever other officey items it would be required to hold

- tall enough to clear the radiator once the butcher block was laid across the top

- short enough to fit right under the windowsill ledge

- double as storage to make up for the two desks we’d be giving up

- $100 or less for both

- and attractive would be a nice bonus as well

we scoured sites like overstock, amazon, and the clearance sections of many websites, but nothing fit all of our criteria.  eventually we decided that to get exactly what we wanted we’d have to make them ourselves.  um, easier said than done.

enter the lifesaving woodworking skills of family friend, danny, and his bumbling apprentice ross.  i’ll let ross take over the story from here:

:::

right you are, dear wife.  a bumbling blithering buffoon of a woodworker.  jk jk, i do have much to learn.  such as how to type in all lower case.  we’ll see how that works out.  well as you can see below, novice meets professional with a lifetime of experience and one heckuva lotta toys.  danny was a tremendous help and can’t be thanked enough.

when i arrived that saturday morning, he had already completed one shelf, which turned out to be a very good thing since we came close but didn’t quite finish the other while i was there.  we got right to work though, starting with measuring and cutting the pieces we’d need.  danny let me do as much cutting as i wanted, offering suggestions and help when i needed it (and ps – want his table saw.  need his table saw).

this shelf was somewhat challenging in that we were including two drawers in the top half but then different sized “cubby” spaces on the bottom half, whereas there was a file drawer in the other shelf.  we ran into a few roadblocks that simply took some improvisation and a trip to lowe’s.

above you can see things being held in place until we were ready to secure it all with screws.  by the way, the majority of these shelves are made up of cabinet-grade plywood with a nice smooth outer finish.

above I’m putting some screws in.  danny’s main drill broke during this process, so we resorted to old faithful… cord and all.  danny was incredibly patient with me the entire time and clearly knew his stuff.  i learned several new woodworking tricks that i hope to use in the future.

above danny is using a dremel tool to add some decorative-ness.  it turned out beautifully and very professional-looking.

and here’s the almost-finished product!  we were working on the right one in this photo.  all it needed was the drawers, so danny finished that up for us and sent them to us via jennifer’s parents.  all-in-all a very fun and educational experience!  can’t say that i’d be comfortable making those myself at this point, but as bill murray put it in what about bob, “baby steps.”

the domino effect

so as i’ve probably mentioned a thousand times:  we have a small house.  a wonderful house that i very much love, but still small.  so it goes without saying that if one room undergoes a significant change (aka turning from a guest bedroom into a nursery) it has a domino effect on at least one other room in the house.  this became the case when our downstairs study needed to also become a part-time guest bedroom.

but first, let’s take a short jaunt down memory lane.

here’s what the room looked like the day we bought the house:  wallpaper from floor to ceiling, a border, and a gothic looking light fixture.

it was over a year that we lived with the room as is.  and then we finally tackled it

until it looked like this

and more or less, this is how the room has looked since then.

it was neat. it was functional.  it maximized storage space through the ceiling-height bookshelves we installed.

but it wouldn’t accommodate a bed.  and the desk on the left was about to be stolen to be converted into a changing table for the nursery.

so we put our heads together and came up with a plan.  a way to create a space that would function as a study 90% of the time, but still be a comfortable place for guests to stay when we had them.

i won’t reveal the finished product quite yet, because i want to document the process a little bit more, but the above picture shows the new star of our study/guest bedroom.

another one bites the dust

So we’re finally ready to reveal the latest room makeover.  To refresh your memory, here’s what the room looked like when we first bought the house.  It’s considered the third bedroom even though its located on the first floor off of the living room and the kitchen (and with no full bath in sight), so we’ve adopted it as our study/office/library/catch all room.  And for about a year all it did was catch all of our junk, until we finally started tackling it around august of last year.

Here’s what the room looked like mid-demo:  the wallpaper got torn off, walls sanded, primed, and painted, and lots of things to be organized.

an old light fixture that just had to go.

and now for the after:  new slate blue walls, new library-esque light fixture, handmade shelves to hold our bulging collection of books, and just a general taming of the madness.

we also scored some new ladder bookshelves ($79 a piece from JCP as opposed to almost $300 a piece from pottery barn – score!) from my parents as a christmas gift, which don’t dominate the space like our old bulky cheap bookshelf from before.

so now we’re no longer scared to show this room off, because even though it has to take on a lot of different functions, it doesn’t have to be ugly doing it.