Art Wall

As some of you know, my office is a work in progress. I have a ton of frames drawn on two walls for when inspiration hits. Everyone is welcome to draw on it. John has taken this opportunity to show his budding art skills. A couple of weeks ago he drew in numerous frames and is now in the process of painting some of them. Here is what has been created thus far. I am quite proud of the little guy.

The next big challenge

So I started this challenge a smidge over a week ago and am not through with it. I did want to do an intermediate post though because who knows when it will be complete. I decided to tackle THE OFFICE. First step was to move everything out of the office. This was no small feat since it was the room I moved everything into when I bought the house. I chose the adjacent dining/living room as the repository for office limbo as you can see here.

Next step was to attack the room and the hideous wallpaper border. Ok, I admit I have seen worse but there was no way this was staying. If I am remembering correctly, the previous homeowners just kept the room like it was from the people they bought the house from. I can't hate the previous homeowners then so I will have to hate the grand-previous homeowners. Get it? Grand-previous = Grandparent? Anyway, so here is what it looked like...
And what I found out is that I hate hate hate residential "paper" wallpaper. I am not sure if the wall was primed at all but what I am sure of is that the wallpaper took off a lot of the top layer of drywall. This next shot is an action "drying" shot of patching compound drying (goes from pinkish/purple to white). It took almost all day to just prep the room for painting.

After the great accomplishment of getting everything removed, patched, and sanded I was ready to paint. To those that have been around me for years you already know that I normally don't paint things white. It not only bores me but it is aggravating because white paint doesn't cover well in my experience. I had little choice though since I was working with a whole scheme in mind for the room. Let me set the scene...months ago while flipping through the Land of Nod catalog, I spied some super awesome wallpaper that was freehand looking drawings of picture frames so that you could color on the walls. I immediately logged that away in my little brain and knew that the office would be where I could pull something like that off. The dilemma was really about what accent color I wanted in the room and where. I have been liking the bright greens a lot lately and kept gravitating back to it. The next question was, what gets the green? Well another bit of inspiration hits me, this time on the internet with an RSS feed. They showed this white bedroom with a blue ceiling...that's it! So on the ceiling went the "lime green" paint. Here is an in progress shot which is the last I have for you right now.

There has been more progress on the room since this photo was taken. New bookcases were assembled (you can see them in boxes in the living room pictures) and added to my existing bookcases to make a wall of bookcases. I also made a stand up table in the middle of the room out of 3 small bookcases and custom cut, frosted and tempered piece of glass from clearview glass company. In addition, the ceiling fan was switched out to a less '80s style with help from a coworker. I moved my desk back in as well as all of the books. I need a file cabinet and something to put my printer and scanner on near my desk. These are the details that are slowing me down right now. I will try to wrap it all up this weekend and get a final photo on the blog. Until then you will have to use your superb imagery skills to imagine.

Feel free to stop by and draw on my walls any time you catch me home.