Office Area Makeover with Create-ologie

We have lived in our current home for five years now, and while I have had some grand schemes for my master bedroom, it has just not been high enough on the priority list to receive much attention until now.

I’m not usually a big fan of office space in a bedroom, but it became necessary for me to have a workspace that isn’t shared with children and we have a giant angled wall in the bedroom that wasn’t serving much of a purpose. I had moved a desk in, but so far it was mostly a clutter magnet.

When the lovely ladies at Create-ologie offered me the opportunity to try out a few of their products for the home, I knew that this would be an ambitious project for me with our crazy fall schedule, but I also knew that I could make this area so much more inspiring, and hopefully help me to be more productive.

This space ties in to a much larger vision I have for this room that probably won’t ever be complete until Anthropologie offers me the opportunity to review this bed (or Pottery Barn this one–I’m not so picky). Our bedroom has high ceilings and a prominent stone fireplace. I envision it eventually looking like a room out of a chateau in the South of France–or rather what I envision a room inside a chateau in the South of France would look like—never having been there. Or maybe it is in Florence…of maybe…I’ll need to go see all these places so I can tell you where it is. The two main functions of a bedroom are (or should be) rest and romance. So even though I created a work-space with in my rest-space, I tried to keep a romantic, soothing and inspiring tone to the area.

The starting point for the design was this big iron gate with clips to hold pictures. It immediately aligned with my romantic visions for the room and gave it that history I was looking for (who cares if my house was built in 2006?). Also important to me was to break up this long boring wall. The height of these pieces help the wall look more to scale in this room.

On a side note, we looked at several homes with our same floor plan before buying this one, and I was amazed at the design choices that people had made with that wall. It is very visible from the bed, so I guess everyone has to decide what they want to stare at when falling asleep. So instead of wall-papering the entire wall with a mural of the beach at sunset–as others before me have done–I decided to fill the gate with images to help inspire me! On one side I focus on gratitude–blessings in my life that I am thankful for.  On the other side–I focus on vision. These images remind me of goals I have for myself and my family. Or feelings I have had in the past that I want to return to. All of the images come from my Instagram feed. I used a company called Printstagram to get them off of my phone and onto my wall. More about Printstagram later. Since the pictures are just held on by clips, it will be a simple matter to rotate pictures or add to my vision board as my goals and vision change.

Also from Create-ologie are these gorgeous metal pins.

I repurposed a few to go in a vase. Because they are so pretty.

I fell in love with them, so I knew I needed some sort of cork board/memo board for the space (oh yeah…and for memos, too!). This was the most time consuming part of the makeover, and I feel like I might still tweak the design or the paint colors. I bought cork trivets from IKEA, found a round gothic shape to go with the lines on the gates, and used an exact knife to cut the notches out of each trivet. (Did I mention time-consuming?) For a touch of modern freshness in my Old-World space, I laid out my circles in a grid and taped off and painted my unifying pattern. When the pattern felt a little too modern and bold, I added my monogram to a plain circle to soften the look a little.

We just used small nails to attach these to the wall in an evenly-spaced grid.

Also from Create-ologie is this great rustic organizer. It would also make a great plate-rack in the kitchen. For now, it holds the files I need to access regularly. It was a bit larger and more yellow in person than I was anticipating. I just brushed a light coat of white paint mixed with glaze over the top of it and quickly made it align better with the rest of the space. The glaze made it so that all of the texture still showed through, but toned down the color to fit my needs.

And that was easy to do because I was alredy in the middle of some serious paint projects. For my Old-World Castle/chateau feel, I knew the walls needed to change. Our walls are a very pleasant shade of builder beige, but it is the same through out the house (except for the kids rooms and my wall-paper wall), and I felt this room needed something different. I agonized a bit about my decision because that meant I would need to do a faux finish and it really seems that those have fallen out of favor in the blogging world as of late. I think it is because we have all seen so many done badly, but if you look at the images from Anthropologie, most of their rooms have a seriously distressed finish.

I may dedicate another post to this, when I have better lighting to show you the finish (can you even tell in this picture?), but I used light gray paint and glaze to go over the beige and cool it down and give some dimension. And yes, I only painted this wall, so far, but I think it will work nicely in the rest of the room and make the fireplace pop.

So lots more to do with this room, but I’m loving the change in the feel I get when I sit down to write a blog post now! The only trouble is my kids love the makeover, too. And now I’ll have to work even harder at keeping them out of my room. 🙂

There is lots of eye-candy over at Create-ologie! And now through Oct. 31, My Insanity readers can enjoy $15 off orders of $50 or more! Use code: MyInsanity at check out!