Completed Desk Area

Has it really been 2 weeks since I posted? Oops.

I've done some serious work on the "office area" in my bedroom over the last month or so.
First I showed you what it looked like currently here,
then I redid a chair I found and wrote about it here,
and I also left some clues about what else I was up to, in my post about my trip to Ikea. So how does my desk corner look now?

Well, I put up the white shelves that I used to have in my kitchen. Remember those?

(yuck, bad picture. I'd like to think I could do better...)

And after I put the shelves up, I decided I needed some matching boxes to store my supplies and papers. This is when my Ikea shopping trip came into play:

I think it looks pretty nice all together. The desk will mainly serve as the area for my sewing machine, but also my bills and other paper work go there.

I'm happy to have such a stylish place to do work!

Office area in Bedroom

Since moving from a two bedroom apartment to a one bedroom, things have shifted. For example, I can no longer use my second bedroom as my office (on the flip side-- I am not longer a student and don't need to spend hours at a dedicated desk with all my textbooks around me). Thus my desk has ended up in my bedroom, which is OK with me. However, along with the loss of my office was all the storage space that my office offered-- a closet, several bookcases and most importantly the option to just close the door if it wasn't looking as pretty as I wanted.

Here is a reminder of what my current desk area looks like (when artificially clean)... 

It normally has mail and other stuff on it, and also you can see I still need a chair, since I have a dedicated dining space in this apartment instead of an eat-in kitchen, so I no longer need to store my extra dinning chairs in other places!

 Now that my office is sort of out in the open, I need to put more effort into organizing it, and organizing it with pretty tools. Here are some inspirational photos I've come across.

From http://www.younghouselove.com/2010/10/house-crashing-inspired-inexpensive/

From http://unclutterer.com/2010/01/22/workspace-of-the-week-splendid-shelving/ 

From http://makingitlovely.com/2008/10/27/studio-tour/ 

From http://makingitlovely.com/2008/10/27/studio-tour/ 

From http://unclutterer.com/2010/02/12/workspace-of-the-week-crafts-contained-2/ 

Get what I'm going for? Any suggestions on how to make my office space awesome?

Office Closet

Remember this?Well, I did some serious work editing what was in my office, resulting in a couple trips to the salvation army, and reorganized my closet. This is what my bookcase looks like now:



Much better, right?
But even more exciting is what the inside of the closet looks like now. I had a much smaller bookcase in the closet, which was not big enough for my collection of binders. I got this one at target for a mere $19.99, and it fits very nicely. The additional shelves allow me to organize my extra office supplies out of my vision if I'm working at my desk, and the door can be closed!



On the other side of the closet, I got baskets and boxes to organize a lot of my craft and sewing stuff. The boxes on the top shelf have scrapbooking stuff, that box on the left holds 12x12 paper. That box was not easy to find! The middle shelf has some holiday decorations and other random stuff, and the bottom shelf has sewing things! One container has projects that I am currently working on, and the other has my collection of material, ribbon, facing, etc. (The patterns and thread and scissors are on the other bookcase, in the boxes on the bottom shelf) That big ugly looking box in the front is my sewing machine. Some day a project will be to clean that up. Perhaps with pretty contact paper? I'm hesitant because the sewing machine is technically an antique and I don't want to ruin its original box (ugh..more than it already is).