Before and After : The Office

Sunday, January 24, 2010

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

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