This is where I used to blog. In my “Muted Gold” dining room. I chose this color when we bought our house because I thought it was yellow. By happy accident, it turned out to be a spicy orange that I loved. Six years ago. We haven’t changed anything about our living and dining rooms since then with the exception of rearranging some furniture and adding new rugs last year. It was time for a change. While I’m nowhere close to being ready to share the rooms, I thought I’d share a sneak peek and tell you what we did to this one little spot.
Before, our computer was on an antique sewing machine base topped with a rectangle of glass. We wall-mounted a shelving unit and stashed all of our techy stuff and called it a day. It was okay, but very cluttered and I hated not having a definitive location for everything. What this means to my husband is that he can stash things wherever he wants. Not so much.
First on our agenda was a change of color. We painted both rooms “Cameo Glass” and it is a very light blue with green and grey undertones. I’m very happy with how the color turned out! We also painted all of the dark, dated wood trim a bright creamy white and the change is UNBELIEVABLE. I seriously feel like I live in a different house. Next up was a change of locale. We moved the computer on the opposite wall next to a built-in nook. Before, this nook had lower doors and a matchstick blind covering the top shelves where we stored CDs, DVDs and other television related junk. Today, it looks a lot different.
By moving the computer to this side of the room I was able to take advantage of the storage and put all of our computer paraphernalia on the shelves. I love that this leaves the desk area clutter free and a lot more organized. We removed the doors and painted out the shelving inside and out and re-used a desk that I bought when Sophie’s bedroom was our craft room.
When I buy fabric for the curtains in our living room, I plan to make a curtain for this area, but temporarily I repurposed a scrap of left-over Martha Stewart tablecloth from K-Mart that I had in my stash. I “whipped” this up on my sewing machine just before bedtime and didn’t say a single ugly word. Gran, aren’t you proud?
The top shelf has a few baskets for computer cables, disks and other unsightly necessities. Then I have a shelf for pretties, including our business cards and a box for bills and things that need to be permanently filed.
The lower shelf is my favorite. I told SD that he could have the desk drawer for his pencil, calculator and notepad, but that the shelves were mine! Aren’t I generous? The green boxes hold stationery, thank you notes and samples. I have some boxes and a stack of LPP tags in a glass box for packaging and a pretty butterfly dish to corral my paper clips and 1 million hair clippies that I take out all over the house. The old drawer came from the aforementioned antique sewing machine base and I’ve repurposed several of them for various things. This one corrals general office supplies we might need while working on the computer.
Not pictured is the contents of the shelves behind the curtain. There we have our printer, modem, wireless router, gobs of cords, batteries, flashlight, phonebook, more LPP stuff and my cameras. Lots of stuff we need, but don’t necessarily want to look at.
I still need to work on a few things here, but it is coming together. We’d like a new desk chair, I still have to figure out how to organize the cords under the desk and I want something pretty to hang on the wall. I am trying not to decorate too quickly because I have a tendency to fill things up. I want our new space to be quiet and organized and less cluttered. I think I’m gonna have to have a yard-sale.
