Putting Our Home Office Together (Finally!)

After having worked for weeks to finish off the walls and crown molding in our home office (way more hours went into filling the nail holes on the new crown molding and painting & caulking it than I had expected...), we're finally starting to move the furniture in. As you may remember, after shopping around for several weeks for a large bookcase, we ended up buying this one from a local store called Merridian: 

We knew that we wouldn't have the office ready for another two months so the store agreed to hold the bookcase in their back room until we were ready for it. Perfect. Well, maybe not. Two weeks after we purchased it, they called to let us know that the store was closing in one week and that we needed to pick up the bookcase ASAP. Panic. WHERE in our house are we possibly going to store this humungous thing. Our only choice was our finished basement, where it has sat for close to two months (much to my daughters' dismay as it was taking up about 90% of the floor space where they typically play).  So all of us were glad to get it out of the basement and into it's new home!: 

We decided not to put the bar and ladder on for now, preferring the more simple look it has without it (which way do you think looks better?). Our home office is not a very big room and I was a little worried that this large bookcase would make it look even smaller, but it actually makes our ceilings look higher and the room look bigger than it did before. I love the bold statement that the bookcase makes, as it's the first room that you see as you enter into our home:

It is a total 180 from how this room used to look when it was in transition from a dining to living room: 

I'm sooo glad to be done with the red (I liked the red when it was a dining room but it's way too intense of a color for an office) - the new wall color is Martha Stewart's Zinc, which is a beautifully warm gray. I also think that it made a big difference to get rid of the wimpy chair rail and to beef up the crown molding. The next step will be styling the bookcase shelves, which I hope to get to later this week.  Our other purchase for the office that I haven't shown you yet is two of these slipcovered chairs, which I snagged at a consignment shop when visiting my parents in North Carolina over Christmas:

The two chairs will sit on one side of the desk and then we'll have a large desk chair on the side next to the bookcase - since we're a laptop-only family and my daughters have gotten to the ages where much of their homework is done by computer, we want three people to be able to use the desk at one time. As far as a desk goes, our shopping for a new one stopped when we found out that we're moving so we'll just be using our old dining room table as a desk for the time being. We also aren't going to bother putting back up the curtain rods and hanging our new curtains. That's the disappointing part - it won't be until we move back to our home in 2-3 years that I will fully finish off this room and have a true "after" to share!  

Hope you're having a good start to your week. Don't forget to enter the pillow giveaway if you haven't already - entries close at midnight on Tuesday!