Hello and welcome to this week’s–month’s… blog post! Thanks for checking in. I’ve been hard at work putting off all household chores and duties as I work on the chaos of my home office. Michael and I moved into our house in September 2022, so for the past 6 months, my books and magazines have been sitting on the floor of our third bedroom as we called it an “office”.
When we had moved out of our apartment and put everything in a storage unit, the last piece that just wouldn’t fit was an old pine bookshelf my parents had given me a few years prior. We have it to our friend just to get it off our hands, and then realized while moving into the house, there was literally nowhere to put our books.
I don’t have a ton of books, but enough to fill that sturdy pine shelf, which means there were enough to create a few mountains on the floor of our office. The bane of my existence has truly been a lack of storage space in our “new” house. It’s a 1920 craftsman that comes with all the joys of small closets. People in 1920 had smaller clothes, probably. Compared to some of the old homes we toured, this one actually had ok-sized closets, but alas, no built-ins or shelves to store my small mountains of books. Picture below for dramatic effect. Isn’t she pretty? My little yellow house.
Once I decided I needed shelving for my books, I couldn’t stop imagining a deep, rich jewel-tone blue office with built-in-looking shelving that spanned across a whole wall. This paired with a persian red area rug like the one below. Some accents of brown leather maybe? And gold fixtures and finishes. Mostly the shelves, though.
Once I had my vision, I just needed to find a way to afford it.
A couple of weeks back I was on TikTok when I saw a video where someone had created shelving in a large closet using target-brand laminate shelves. The most exciting part of that was that she said each shelf was only $37. I immediately found them online and saw there were exactly 4 available for purchase at my local target. I sat on it for a few days and then decided to pull the trigger and grab them. After many hours of assembling, I finally got them all standing and thus began the work of creating my very own “built-ins” for my dream wall of books. Below is a picture of what the shelves looked like all setup before I had primed or painted them. You can see three are white and one is brown. This was just what was available at the store and since I painted everything the same color, I figured it didn’t matter!
After one and a half weeks of painting the walls blue after work, and learning how to do trim work by cutting 45 degree angles with a guide and a hand saw, this is what it looks like now:
I’ve got the rug and the shelves, now I just need to update the lighting and figure out the desk situation. I’m so excited to finish everything and style it up! Once I do that I’ll take some pretty photos to share.
So long, fellow designer. Until next time.
Emma
