I kinda sorta maybe just slightly redecorated our studio (dining room). Again. This room had been looking a lot more cluttered since the last time I posted about it and the color was bugging me more and more so it was just a matter of time before this redo happened. Redos happen a lot in this room because we are in it so much and our needs for it change almost daily. Maybe that explains it.
My (our) studio (office) needs to be in our dining room. The whole house is only about 1300 square feet so most rooms serve dual purposes. One day last week, I was sitting in this room and I noticed a wooden box of receipts up on the shelf. And then I noticed a big canvas bin labeled "Portfolio Pieces" and another bin labeled "Tape Recorders" and another bin labeled "Scrapbook Projects" and it occurred to me that I hadn't looked in those bins in over a year. And then it occurred to me that those bins made sense at one time, but now they were just cluttering up the dining room. I wondered where else they could go. And then it occurred to me that there were things in the cabinet (which we call the "art cabinet") that had been hanging around since Arden was a toddler so in about two nanoseconds, I had my paint swatch book out and I started pulling stuff out of the cabinet.
I wanted to make this room more welcoming and feel more spacious so I put this little seating area together. We used to have a large shelving unit here but once I got rid of the stuff on it, we didn't need it anymore (funny how that works). When the previous owners lived here, there was a wood stove that sat on the brick here and that was super cute but also super old and super not up to code so our insurance agent made us take it out before we moved in. We'd been wanting to make this space into a little cuddly reading nook for a while now and with this last redo, we finally did it.
To make the seat cushion, I had a piece of 3" foam cut to size then sewed a cotton canvas cover for it. And, umm, I've never made anything like it before and it was not fun at all. The first seam I sewed was backwards (don't ask me how because I almost did it again) and then I had to take the whole thing apart and then we ripped the stupid thing when we tried to get the foam inside. It's a little bit shanty town but there is no way I'm making another one.
My idea was to make this whole wall be the entire office and have it contain all of the art and office supplies—that way the rest of the room could look and function more like a dining room instead of looking like our old basement. I think the hardest part was (and has always been) integrating two computer screens into the same room where we eat all of our meals. I think this is about as integrated as it's going to get.
Here was my original sketch before IKEA made it all happen:
Pretty close!
I was so happy to empty the shelves of all of the old craft supplies. Since this is more of the dining area now, I'm using this unit as sort of a low-brow version of a china cabinet. I had some old pottery in the garage and I had some other pieces scattered around the house so I just grouped them all together here. Right now, I'm liking these shelves sparse and open and I hope to keep them that way.
Lastly, I painted the walls Benjamin Moore OC-14 Natural Cream which is just about the most boring name for a paint color I've ever heard. I almost didn't use it because of that name and though it's hard to tell in these pictures, it's actually more of a light putty color rather than a cream or beige. Picking a color for this room wasn't easy. The living room that it's connected to is a pale, creamy bluish-greenish-gray so anything more saturated than OC-14 looked ridiculous next to it. I like that the new color tones down the yellow in the wood and it also helps blend all of the colors together.
I never expected that this room (previously my least favorite room in the house) would be my favorite room now. It ended up being softer and subtler and more monochromatic than I anticipated but that was a welcomed surprise. Sometimes redoing a room is worth the time and energy. I think most of the time it is.
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