our new home office

The largest project we have tackled in our house so far, would be our home office last October. We bought the house with the room not really being defined as anything but extra space, but I think you could consider this as a major update.

Tthis is where our room started out, well... kind of. We started tearing the room down in this picture, but it our only 'before'. Notice the very ugly carpet squares and the cinder block wall. I think the builders of this home probably used this room as a mud room. The hallway in the back of the hallway leads to the 'man' bathroom. Which contained the same ugly carpet. This was definitely the ugliest room in the house, and we didn't really use it until after this remodel.

Here you can see where we already replaced the back door leading to the back yard (which used to be an interior door with an enormous doggy door). This door helps keep the warm air in during the winter. The door leading to the garage was also replaced (another door that was also an interior door), our house is much more efficient now! Here we put furring strips into the cinderblock, filled with a light foam insulation, and hung drywall. This made the room look like, well, a real room.

This was the biggest obstacle of our remodel, the slight slope leading up to the foyer near our front door. There are not many flooring options that don't need a flat floor, so we decided to make ours flat. We rented a jack hammer, jack hammered out the slope, and poured new cement.

Here is the room about half-way done, we used a ply wood as a subfloor since this was on a ground level with cement floor. We laid a layer of plastic as a water barrier beneath the sub-floor. Notice the new door leading out to the garage. The vents on the ceiling were quite aged and brown looking, so we removed them and spray painted them a fresh white.

We decided to lay a dark bamboo floor, so we had a little variety in our home, we decided something unique to the house would be nice in this room since it is on it's own level. We have oak floors in the rest of the house. My husband Carl laid the floor, and it actually went up very quickly! He did a great job and it really makes the room!

And we're done! We decided to go bold, with Avocado paint and white trim. We painted all of the doors, windows, and trim white to give it a crisp look. Painting woodwork is NOT easy. We made the mistake of using a gloss paint, I think it took somewhere between 5 and 7 coats of paint! Very time consuming.. but I totally think it was worth it! We're considering painting the rest of the trim in our house white as well... if only we had more time!

The final result turned out awesome, we are soo happy with it! We bought the L-shaped desk at Nebraska Furniture Mart, the small shelf on the right is actually an extra night stand from our bedroom, and I refinished the desk chair to match the desk and used some fun striped fabric.

This post definitely made this project much easier than it was.. we worked really hard and finished the office in about 3.5 weeks! Notice in the 'after' photo, the sun has gone down, it was probably about midnight!