Thursday, January 30, 2014

Office closet

Since my last post, I had grand plans of posting all of the things we have done to the house over the last 6 months but I've been a little preoccupied with our latest project in the "office". We call it the office but really, it is just bedroom number two and currently we are using it as the dogs room (yes our dogs have a room), and extra storage space. At the time I took the pictures below, we had our guest bed set up in there.


We would like for this room to ultimately serve as an office and also have a sleeping space in case we have extra guests. We were getting ready to paint the office (it was a bright green color) when I was looking at the closet and kept thinking what a horrible use of space it was. It is a reach-in closet, not a walk-in and it has two separate skinny doors. There is a section of wall space in between the doors that makes it really difficult to get anything in or out of the closet or even see what is inside. So I had this grand idea "Why don't we just knock that section of wall out and make the opening bigger?" Seems simple enough right? It should just be a weekend project right? Wrong! Three weeks later and we are still working on it, although it is pretty close to being done, phew!
As you can see, this closet lay out was just a bad use of space. It had to go.
First, we emptied out the room and painted the ceiling (it was a dingy yellowish/white). Then we painted the walls, knowing that the wall the closet was on was going to have to be repainted. I really wanted to do something fun on the walls but still keep it pretty neutral, so I decided to paint some thick horizontal stripes on one wall of the room. I chose to paint the bedroom the same color we painted the living room, partly because it was neutral and partly because I had almost an entire gallon of that paint color left over in the garage so I didn't have to buy any. Before I came to this conclusion, I painted several sample colors on the wall.



Apparently, I only took one picture of the new wall color before the stripes and it has the flash on so you can't really tell the color but here it is:
To put stripes on the wall I measured the distance from the floor to ceiling, then divided that distance by the number of stripes I wanted. I decided on 9 stripes, 5 the same color as the rest of the walls and 4 in a different color, a lighter off-white. So I think each of my stripes ended up being around ten inches wide. I measured and marked every 10 inch increment on the wall, then I got my wall mounted laser level (this thing is awesome!) and used the laser to tape the lines across the wall. Honestly, without the laser level, I'm not sure I could have done straight lines.


You can tell that some of the stripes look thinner than others. The tape went on the inside of the stripes that were going to remain the same color as the walls. Then I put a small piece of tape inside those stripes so I didn't accidentally paint them. It sounds easy enough to remember but you'd be surprised! You can see the laser lever in the top of the picture above. I highly recommend purchasing one of these, it's great not just for taping straight lines, but for picture hanging too. Once the taping was done, I painted my four stripes the different color. While that paint was drying, Sean touched up the baseboard trim paint (and yes, he is winking at the camera).


 I really love the way the stripes turned out!
Well, I must call it a night, but I will continue to show you the office closet transformation next time.
-Amy



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