Dining Room/Office

I'm finally getting around to posting pictures of our new house. Thanks to Sam's initiative, we now have more of a Master Design Plan than we ever have before. I always just bought stuff based on if I liked it or not, without any real idea of where it would go or how it fit in with what we already had. So, this time, since we had almost a year to think about this house (as it was being built), we talked about what kind of style we really liked, and what kind of look we wanted to have in the house. Naturally, this is all limited by what we already have, and what we can afford--but really, we have been able to do a lot of stuff fairly cheaply, just by knowing what we want and what to look for. That allows us to snatch up something we happen to encounter on sale, or to wait for something we really like to go on sale.

The original plan of the house had the dining room on the other side of the kitchen, and this space pictured above was called a "family room." We didn't like breaking up the space like that, and figured the living room should be one big space rather than a split living/dining (pictures in next post), so we had them tile the floor and make this part the dining room instead. That left the bumped-out wall on the left of the picture---planned to hold a fireplace or entertainment center for the family room---open, which was perfect, since we needed a place for our computer and office stuff. We like to have the computer in a family area anyway, so we can be together while one of us is working or looking up recipes or whatever.

Before we moved in, we took our photos of the empty room, and Sam digitally drew in our ideas of what we hoped to have in the space. We tried a few different ideas:

and Sam drew in the furniture we already knew we wanted, like the dining room table and the orange office chair. We hoped we could find IKEA shelves and tabletops to fit the space(somehow I feel kind of pretentious using the word "space", like I think I'm a designer or something--sorry--it just seemed to work better than "room"), and luckily they did! Although we could only fit 1 vertical shelf next to the desk.

As you can see, the final product turned out very much like our (well, I say "our" but obviously it's really Sam's) drawing. With more clutter, of course. But it does a pretty good job of giving everything a place to be put away.

We were lucky to find the orange curtains at IKEA too. We had to paint the computer shelf (under the table top) to match the shelves, since it only came in white. If you do this, I hear (too late for us) that the key to making it work is using PRIMER. We didn't, we just sanded it first, and the paint didn't adhere very well, so we may have to redo that at some point.

But I feel like it's a good idea to do this kind of pre-drawing, as it can help you see what you really like in the room before committing to it. Clearly I am extremely lucky to be married to such a talented artist/designer (just one of the millions of reasons I'm lucky to have that man) but it can work pretty well even if you just cut and paste in pictures you got from websites, or use "fill" to try out wall colors. I did this without Sam's help for some things. (We use Corel's Painter X for this type of thing, but Photoshop works too.)