Darwin helping with the office makeover.  He was adopted, so it is quite possible that he has some Swedish roots….

This weekend we planned to enjoy the fall weather, maybe take a few pictures locally and get some small things done around the house.  On Saturday morning, I walked into our office to print something for my sister and law and this is what I saw…. (cue the horror movie music)

Not that I didn’t know this catastrophe existed, but I guess it’s just been bothering me more lately since this is my desk….

Yes.  There is no glass in that frame.  And my husband has been using it to store a bunch of empty boxes from things we have ordered.  So since my physical ‘desk’ is that, I tend to take my laptop and sit myself here, in the timeout chair…

While Mike sits here….

Now we’re both to blame for this mess.  The office has been a very neglected portion of our house, mainly because we had such big dreams for it.  The room is probably my favorite in the house… it has the bay window, french doors and loads of light.

Because it has doors that can be closed, it has become the “keep things from the cats” area.  So it stores tools…

And failed design projects, such as this large mirror from our condo I planned to hang over the fireplace…

And as far as storage, we had this piece of furniture left over from our condo, which I am fully to blame for cluttering…

Now the office is mostly Mike’s space, he spends hours in there each day so I wanted to make sure he got the dream office he always wanted.  I use my laptop and got used to having it on my lap while we lived with my in-laws, so I didn’t miss having a desk until I recently went back to school and started this gig.  Our original idea was to someday do custom cabinetry, where Mike could have an L shaped desk and I would get an extended portion of one end.  We even went so far as to sit down with some cabinet designers at Lowe’s who came up with this…

We planned to do some dark wood cabinets with my favorite countertops, the Eco ones from Cosentino.  However when we got the estimate, it came out to be a small fortune.  But we knew it was an investment and with all of the work Mike does, we wanted it to suit our needs.

Turns out we had another pressing project to put our money towards.  Next week we will be getting hardwood floors in our upstairs hallway and bedroom, as well as adding a wall up there.  More about that later, but we decided to put the office project on the back burner for a year or so.  Until yesterday morning…

When I was attempting to print, sitting in my timeout chair, a little light blub went off in my head.  I knew we needed more storage, so I told Mike that we should go to Ikea to get one of the Expedit bookcases I’ve loved for years.  I knew it would fit nicely inbetween our desks and we would get some much needed storage.

So Saturday afternoon it was off to Ikea.  We picked up this bookcase and headed home.  Fast forward to this morning, when Mike had the idea to just get two desks, which would face each other.  We bounced ideas off of each other and ran back to Ikea.  We found a bunch of things that would work for us, but they were out of some of the pieces.  So we ran to yet another Ikea, the third location in 24 hours.  Luckily they had everything we needed to finally organize our office… for a very small fraction of the price of cabinetry.

I’m actually more excited about this spontaneous change of plans then I was for the original one.  I’m always up for a challenge and in the end I guess we took our own office advice…

To be continued, office!

It doesn’t get much prettier than that, mother nature.

Displayed in Ikea’s Ikea Stockholm bowl.

It’s getting there!

I haven’t posted in a while, but that’s okay because I also haven’t told anyone about this yet!  We’ve been working a little bit on the design and direction of the site.  But I’m back!!

I spent this past weekend at what is becoming one of my favorite stores: Ikea.  Ikea used to be known more for their quirky items, swedish meatballs, generally low (meaning in height)  and cheap (meaning in price) furniture.  But recently it seems that Ikea has been able to distinguish between cheap and inexpensive design, with even their furniture stepping up it’s game recently.  Every time I go there, and we’ve been going at least once a month, I manage to find some treasure that I didn’t discover the last time I was there.  This visit was unplanned and we didn’t expect to find anything, as we were just there about 2 weeks before.  We went mainly to accompany my brother and sister-in-law and hang out with the nephew.

Our first find was these Merete curtains in brown for an affordable $39.99.

They are the perfect taupe-ish color we are looking to paint our living/dining room area.  Window treatments for an entire house are a biiiig expense, so we were happy to find something reasonable that perfectly matched the style, color and vibe we wanted in our dining room.  Plus they are a nice, heavy material that my curtain climbing cat will not be able to pull.  After thinking about it, we want to pick up another pair for the opposite window in the living room.

My beef with Ikea curtains is that, out of convenience, you have to hem the bottom with their iron-on hemming strips.  We already own these Ikea Stockholm Blad curtains from our condo, which I still love.

I had to perform an Ikea hack of sorts on these.  First the opening for the curtain rod, that top part that looks unattractively scrunchy, was too small for our chunky rod.  I hand sewed some tabs onto the back so that our rod would fit and bypass the opening.  I also used the iron-on hemming strip on the bottom, only to have my cat pull it out in a week.  Since I didn’t have a sewing machine, I brought them to a tailor who permanently hemmed them, and also machine sewed the tabs I made.  Luckily the Merete curtains have oversized metal eyelets at the top to avoid the curtain rod issue and looks so much neater.  And I have since gotten a sewing machine (thanks mom!)

My other great find was these Dinera dinnerware sets…

These are listed on the Ikea website for $14.99 for 6 place settings.  We picked up the brown and the beige to mix and match.  The funny thing about these ridiculously inexpensive plates is that we registered for a Calvin Klein set which exactly resembles this.  One (that is 1) place setting of the CK version was $49.99- on sale.  We registered for 12 and only got a few.  So we were able to pick up 12 place settings of this Ikea version for a whopping $30!!  Here is the CK version in the beige….

Yes, they matched right down to the color choices.  The only difference was that the Ikea sets did not include mugs, but who really uses them when entertaining? Our guests prefer booze.

Until next time, Ikea!