Office Built-Ins

When you first walk into our house there is an office on the left. We always wanted a designated office, not just a room set up as an office, or a corner in a bonus room taken up by a desk, so it was one of the bonuses that came with buying THIS house. It has great etched glass double doors and the room is pretty big.

It's good that the room is bigger too, because with the addition of Preslie to our family, it has also become the guest bedroom. We got an awesome black leather living room set, super modern - which we love! - , the sofa (which is a queen pull out) ended up in the office, love seat in Preslie's room and the chair is in our living room. The pull out is great! It allows the room to still be an office the 99.9% of the time that that is all it is, but then that .1% of the time when it is a guest bedroom the room becomes not so big anymore. Between the bed, the desk, and the shelves that we had in the room, it was hard for a guest to do anything but walk around the bed.

So we FINALLY did something about it. My Uncle Brent is an expert carpenter and he and Eric got together and made custom built-ins for the office. Now witht he built-ins, which have two separate desks, when the pull out bed is "out" there is MORE than enough room for guests to kick back and relax.

I wish we had taken better before pictures, but we kind of didn't think about it until the room had already been pulled apart to paint. But you will get the basic gist of it now. It's also not entirely done yet. WE still have to finish the back board above the desk area, put in the drawers, and finish the baseboards. But we had to prime everything, sand it, prime it, sand it, paint it, sand it, paint it, sand it, etc etc etc . . . . . so I think we have done pretty well considering we are never at home!

I will get the final pictures up as soon as we finish it completely, but here are some for the time in between.

Here is the paint color before. It's kind of this sage/khaki green. Our entire house is painted this color (with the exception of the rooms we have already painted) and we loved it because it was super modern and yet super neutral. But we have reached the point where EVERY room painted that color is getting a little old. We chose a chocolate brown - literally the paint color is called chocolate milk. It looked dark at first, but after we got the ceiling painted, and drapes up, and the cabinets were painted, we LOVE it.

Here's all the cabinets in the office, just after Eric and Brent finished building them, getting ready to prime.

Eric with the cabinets hung. My Dad and brother-in-law Jared came over and helped get them all up. They only have the first coat of primer on in this picture. We had to sand them all down, and then prime them again before we could even put the first coat of paint on.

And these are the cabinets after the first coat of "Lincoln Cottage" black paint. As you can see, if you don't sand them out and repaint, sand them out and repaint, again and again, you can see the paint lines. We are also doing a backer board of magnetic metal and we're thinking cork board between the desk and shelves, that is not in yet. That's why you can still see the "Go Ducks" sign Eric put up. And the drawers aren't done yet, and the black trim needs to go up still, but I am already in love with the way it looks!

They look pretty custom I think, I am very proud of Eric, he has so MAD skills! And I don't think anyone will believe how much we actually spent on them! :)