Total Transformation: The Office

I did a quick painting project on a small bookshelf for my office last night (which I'll show you in a bit), and it got me thinking that I really should fully document that room's renovation in a post.

I started digging through the pictures that we took of the house before and right after we closed, and I honestly had kind of forgotten how much of a total shithole this house was. Seriously, most sane people would have walked in and bolted out the front door. But, luckily, we saw the massive potential in this place and decided to take a chance. But man oh man, it was a complete dump.

The family we bought the house from had owned it for over 50 years. After the mother passed away, the family rented it out. When we went to look at it, there was a family renting it with two small children. I can't even imagine letting a child sleep in this place the way it was. Yes, it was bad.

Be prepared, the next few pictures are not for the faint of heart.

This is the office before closing, when it was a little girl's "bedroom":



The water damage was from years before and the roof had since been replaced. But the room still had corroded wallpaper, paneling on one wall, dirty lace curtains, and generally looked like a crack house.

After closing, when the room had been cleared out and the tenants had moved, it was still a scary sight.



As with the rest of the house, we pulled down the ceilings, walls, and paneling and put up fresh new sheet rock.

Here's the room after it had been sheetrocked and primed:



The transformation was already astounding. Then came the paint, in a cream color that I selected. I forget the exact name now, it was "beach" something. It's a nice color... cheery but not overpowering.



And here's the office now, completely new and without any trace of the prior disgustingness...






It's not so bad spending my 40 hours a week working in here now... :)

Remember that the desk started off as just a simple unfinished wood piece that we finished and customized.



Branden finished it in a dark stain and I found a fun clock knob to add to the front.



Around the same time I also painted an ugly laminate bookcase and added a patterned fabric to the back.





It was a big pain in the butt, involving lots of polyurethane, but I'm really happy with the way it turned out.



I also used the same fabric to cover the bulletin board next to the window and tie everything together.

So that brings me to the project I worked on last night, that you can see a sneak peek of in one of the above photos.

I've had this little bookcase for ages, and back when I was probably 13 or 14 I decided to "enhance" it by adding some gold metallic paint to it...



Since then, I've moved it around with me from apartment to apartment but never did anything else to it. A couple of fresh coats of white paint later, and it looks very different!



It's a nice space to display some things in my office, and pretties up that corner a bit more, which I'm always a fan of.

In case the earlier pictures weren't enough torture for you, here's a view of this side of the office back before we closed and the renters were still using it as a trash heap living here:



...and now...




It's really hard for me to believe that this is the same room, or the same house for that matter, as when we bought the house in June. It's only been seven months!

I hope to do more of these "total transformations" posts for each room in the house, so stay tuned for those!