A little office facelift

Ever since I began my maternity leave, I have spent most mornings with my tea, nursing Benjamin at the computer. I'd like to say I'm perusing news websites and other grown up things like that, but in truth I'm reading blogs and checking twitter. Anyway, this is a little nook of our home that has been neglected in all of my decorating efforts, so I thought it was time to make it pretty.

I also wanted to do this project for little to no money at all. Our rec room is truly one of those rec rooms filled with our old forgotten furniture, so to spend a ton on this just didn't make sense (since if I was doing that, there would surely be a new desk, chair, carpet, drywall....). So I scavaged my basement and spent a few bucks at Walmart, and I'm pretty happy with the result!

The first thing I knew that I wanted to have was a mini gallery wall. I am borderline obsessed with these (also planning a larger scale one upstairs later this year), so I needed to get together some frames. I happened to have a bunch of these lying around, so the first step was to pull out the old crappy pictures in them and paint the frames.

I also knew that I wanted a bulletin board...which sounds very grade school but I like the look of inspiration boards when they are done right, so I headed to my local Walmart and grabbed one for about ten bucks.

Lastly, I had been itching to make a new painting or two, so I took some paintings I had done years back, repainted them all white, and started over. Gotta love it when things are 100% free!

So, after a bunch of coats of white paint on everything, I was almost done! The last thing I did was gather some pictures, have a few new prints made, and started matting everything. For those of you who don't already use it, I highly recommend Walmart's Photo Centre. You do everything from home and a few hours later they call you and tell you it's all ready. And it's cheap! I spent another ten bucks getting the prints done up...not bad at all.

So, first off a gruesome before shot. This is WAY before, as in before we painted anything in the house and just threw our desk against the wall. Pretty right?

And now the after!

Same old desk and chair, but it's much better I think! As you can see we added a picture of Benjamin, one of our wedding photos, a vintage Vogue cover, a Picasso print, and a custom typographic print. And my new paintings of course!

Here's a bit of a closer look at the inspiration board. Everything seems to look better to me when it's been painted white, ha ha. And I finally have a cute spot for my Audrey calendar!

So that's it! I'm so happy with it, and it makes my morning routine much cuter!