Setting up House: The Office

The office room is one of our favorite rooms in the house. It faces south and west, and has awesome sunset views over the pond and Tobacco Root Mountains to the west. Like these:

Of course, the utility trailers are not longer in the middle of the lot to our west!

We’d like our office to “Do” a couple of different things:

1.  Be an organization center for our paperwork, which means we need to bite the bullet and actually purchase a file cabinet. 
2.  Be a second TV room/ sitting room for us and guests (the office and guest room are attached through a Jack and Jill bathroom)
3. Be a repository of our books/ library (I have a LOT of books. Total history nerd)
4. Storage is good.

As usual, we’re also broke. And the tax credit we’re so excited about getting probably won't happen 'till May. Yeaaaahhhh…. That sucks.

So! Office setup! Must! Be! Cheap!

First, a quick refresher on what the office currently looks like, here she is in all her glory:

Yowza.

The basic floor plan of the office looks like this:

Why yes, yes I do draw room layouts in powerpoint. It's all I have!

The closet in the office is bigger than in the guest room, and it is currently storage for extra coats (holy mother of god, do we have a lot of coats!), random wedding stuff, our two rolling suitcases, a Tupperware of my out of season clothes and my sewing machine. But, there is no reason this stuff needs to stay in the office closet.

 

 Here’s my long term plan for the office:

So totally not to scale.

Going around the room clockwise: couch on the left with photographs hung above, lamp in the corner either one of the torch lamps from downstairs (when we get new living room furniture- someday) for reading. Door to bathroom, Mt. Saint Helens Photo of DJ’s, window, double drawer lateral file cabinet with TV above, window, desk with parish chair (recover?), bulletin board hanging on wall above desk, shelves my dad built for me as a kid above desk, with various boxes for storage, book case (if it fits), closet (generally unchanged)

So what does all of that look like pulled together, you ask? Well, here’s the inspiration I’m looking at:
 
For the couch area:
 

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Pretend for a minute that this Pottery Barn inspiration is the east wall in our office. The tan couch is against the wall. There is a small coffee table. A lamp in the corner. Exchange that couch for the one seen in this 2006 picture of my Lexington apartment:

And exchange the coffee table for something like these ottomans, which have storage in them too.

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The wall behind the couch area is long, and I'm not sure if we'll want to use the mirror seen in the Lexington apartment photo, as well as framed photos to fill it, or find some cool artwork.

For the file cabinet/ TV area:

I'd like to go with a double drawer lateral file cabinet in this corner for a number of reasons. First, it's a lot of storage. Second, it'd be the right dimension to sit a TV on top of. And last, because a square two drawer cabinet will not fit to the right of the desk area.

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Despite our real need for a file system, I just have a really, really hard time dropping over $50 on a file cabinet. I'll be searching second hand and antique stores for this purchase. I could always buy one in the "wrong" color and repaint it....

For the desk area:

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Obviously we'll use my (free desk) until we're grownups and can afford a new one.

 

Of particular note here is the wall mounted shelving above. That's how the brown shelves my dad built me have been mounted in the past, although I believe it's possible to mount them by their ends for a less cluttered background. I like the idea of filling the shelves with boxes like these for storage of random stuff like cameras, camera equipment, assorted items, cords, etc.

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And the magazine butlers for corralling Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware and In Style magazines.

 

I’d like to continue to use the chair my grandma gave me from the parish house in Colton. You’ll note it’s pink, which isn’t totally cohesive with our tan, cream and chocolate color scheme. I could recover it, but if I do I want the chair to be a burst of color. Like a rich whiskey color. Or seafoam blue. Or something.

 I'd like to add pops of color to the mostly neutral color scheme using the lamp shades, couch pillows, and chair coverings. Window treatments, as well could help add color to the room. I haven't decided where to go with window coverings; I'd prefer to sew them if possible to save money. I like being able to sit at the desk and look down on the street at the world below, so being able to see out the bottom of the window will be key.

What do you think so far? It's definately not a total slam dunk, yet. But we'll get there. We're headed over to Livingston today to check out some antique stores, maybe we'll find some treasures!