Happy Easter 2011

Hope you're enjoying your Easter Sunday!  We had some unusual decorations on our table.  I wonder what is in the colourful eggs?

Why, baby monsters of course!

Styling Roman!

Nothing like searching for eggs in a building site!

Man Cave His Office progress

Happy Easter!

Owl Lamp

My new owl lamp from West Elm arrived yesterday, and it's so cute.

Here it is in situ.

And if you read my previous post, you'll know that the hubby is also renovating a home office for himself.  Here's the lamp that he chose!

Jonathan Adler Boob  Georgia Lamp from here.

Battle of the Home Offices

My evil plan worked!  I've made the home office so girly that Damian refuses to come in here.  It's finally spurred him in to action to do something with the absolutely wasted space that was formally a garage.  Let the battle begin, may the best girl/boy win.

Starting point.

mine

his

Items we have to reincorporate into the new spaces:
Mine: desk & chair
His: table, chairs, bookcase, office accessories, rugs, any old piece of crap furniture that has found its way into the garage.

New items:
Mine: bookshelves, bench, light, lamps, office accessories, stool.
His: nothing too expensive, I hope!  Although he is threatening to put in one of those god awful ikea office desks that go round a corner, yuck.

More before pictures of the garage.

Beautiful garage built in the 1950's

Yes that is a fence built across the driveway, hence no access for car, hence dumping ground for old furniture, electronics, paint, anything that was too much effort to take to the dump or sell.

New french doors

 Damian neglected to take before pictures of the old garage door.  Tsk, tsk.  Doesn't he know people want to see true before pictures!  Anyway, the french doors were my idea, don't let him tell you any different.  We also plan on putting a french door that we already had where the stable door was.   No more Mr. Ed, unfortunately.  (People always thought we kept a horse in there!)

What a mess!

Progress

So now that we are officially going to have a his & hers office, I can really go over the top.  Umm, where can I incorporate some pink?  I did buy this the other day, which wasn't on my original design board.

westelm.com

Isn't he cute?  Yes, I know another bird thing.

You're probably wondering where he's going to go, well I was in Ikea and spotted this:

Malm table from Ikea.com

So I bought it in white to go along the back wall of the office.

The lamp is from the living room and will be replaced with the owl lamp.

The posters were my compromise for Damian.  I'm thinking of framing them in black.  They're just temporarily propped up there.  I had planned on surprising Damian with an original 40 inches by 60 inches Help poster from the sixties from Ebay.  I even had the winning bid for a couple of hours.  I was prepared to go up to $150, really who would pay more than that for a poster (sorry Kevin!)?  But I was outbid by hundreds!!  Next time Dame.

Back to the garage mahal.  Here are some pretty garage conversions.  I wonder if Damian's plan will turn out like any of these?

image from apartmenttherapy.com

image from casasugar.com

Way to go Julian!

Today's post is a little interlude from the usual design related topics.  Julian, Damian's younger brother, is running in the Salt Lake City half marathon right now!  We're very proud of him.  He's an Austrialian citizen, raised in England, who is temporarily living in California (it's a long story).

Go Julian!

Looking good!

The marathon runs right past our front door, lucky us.  I can hear all the cow bells and cheers as I write this post.

Waiting for Julian with coffee and pastries.

cute picture of Callum 

One day boys.

My house, and view through front door to the park.

Office Makeover Part 5: Pendant Light

The home office lighting situation was sad to say the least.  We'd made the mistake of replacing the pendant light with recessed lighting when we renovated 10 years ago.  Fast forward 10 years, and we're now trying to bring decorative lighting back into the home.  Fortunately, as I mentioned in an earlier post, Ballard Design have come up with an ingenious light that converts cans to pendants.  The shades that come with the light fixture are pretty generic, and because of the fixture, you have to use their shades.  However, a little bit of DIY and voila:

custom light shade in Thomas Paul fabric by Duralee

And here's how I did it:

Pull off trim (thankfully it's only glued on).  Cut fabric to size and make sure it fits.

Ughh, 1 inch too short!  Dilemma, do I use two pieces of fabric, which would mean two seams, or use one piece and cover the seam with some extra fabric?

Decided to have only one seam.  I didn't even try to match up the pattern because the seam will be facing the wall and you won't really see it.  Next step, spray glue the fabric and roll it on the shade.  Easier said than done.  I think the fabric stuck to my leg a thousand times, and managed to attract assorted hairs and fluff, yuck.

I did contemplate making matching piping from the thomas paul fabric, but fortunately the original piping was still intact, and matched the shade nicely.

And because the room is taking so long to finish, I thought I'd show you  a quick before and after.

Almost finished, but have a few more projects lined up.  Hardest part is deciding what is going to go where on the shelves.

Office Makeover Part 4: Chair After

Remember what the office chair looked like before.

Drum roll please...........

I decided to go with the yellow piping.  Goes nicely with
the new lamp.

Wow, I guess my grey walls and grey desk top are really lilac and purple.  Oh well, goes with the girly vibe.  Sorry Damian, I did try to make it somewhat masculine.  Better get started on that mancave in the garage!