Striped Office Walls

 Finally!  Phase One of Spare Room

 {As this room took forever to complete, I thought this post should be really long and forever to complete as well.  So sit back and enjoy my ramblings please.}

When we had our son we consolidated our office and guest bedroom, as we obviously weren't giving up our room, in order to make room for baby {we have lots of out of town guests, so we can't get rid of the guest bed}.  It is a really small room and has been u.g.l.y. ugly since we moved in.  Although it still needs some work as you can tell from the before pictures, ANYTHING would be an improvement.

{Before}

{Before}

This room was fairly neglected.  Other than having shoved the furniture into the space little more has been done to it.  The paint on the walls is the original color from when we moved into the house.  The color is very neutral and I have always planned to paint it some day.  Once the wainscot and the baseboards had been painted white I realized the wall color wasn't so bad.  We had left over paint in the garage to touch it up where there were nail holes, and to spice it up I decided to do stripes {hubby didn't know this and when he got home for a trip I learned he doesn't much care for the stripes, oops!}

So here is the plan for the room, as with all of the rooms in our house we do as time and budget allow instead of all at once.  I didn't spend any $$$ on this make over, and the stripes and closet doors were the main changes with some other minor changes.  The drapes were moved farther from the window frame in order to take full advantage of the six foot floor to ceiling window.  I would like to finish the space with this light from Ikea at $69.99, isn't she cute?!

 I know there are many ways to do stripes, and I have tried most all of them.  I thought I would try a new method, maybe not for everyone; and definitely not the proper way to get stripes, but it works for me.  I just use a level and mark the lines with pencil and then {gasp} without using painters tape just cut in with a trim brush.

After having taken everything off the wall for painting I took the opportunity to figure out how I was going to arrange the frames on our awkward wall above the desk and bed.  Like I said before I didn't want to spend any moolah, as we would like to have another child in the not to distant future and this room would need to be changed again.  I used frames that we had laying around, and filled them with various things.  Some are scrapbook paper, some are stationary and a few are pictures.  I haven't had much luck with arranging artwork on this wall so I decided to scale it all out before nail holes scarred my beautifully painted walls.  

...and here she is!

The previous owner had two of those metal file boxes in the garage and so I took one sanded it down and painted it with high gloss white spray paint.  

I just love how my freshly painted black doors look with the striped walls.  I would like to put those teal knobs from my inspiration board on the closet doors, and I've had the inkling to paint only the chair-rail turquoise.  I think it would make it stand out since the stripes kinda make it look wimpy, but I don't know.