My Office

One of the first projects we took on was getting my office ready. Since I didn't change jobs but relocated, I needed a home office that could serve as my primary work space during the week. One of the upstairs bedrooms was the perfect space for an office (the other will be a guest bedroom), so we set to painting it right away. 

The room has seven-foot ceilings (can I say hobbit house?!?) and a doghouse dormer, allowing for slightly more floor (and head) space, given the low ceilings that slope down with the roof line to ~five feet above the floor. With the lines in the room, crown molding would have been challenging to install and might have looked weird, so we opted for a chair rail instead. This allowed us to add another color to the walls and dress up the space a little bit. Here's how it looked before:

And here's a few pictures of how it turned out. On the ceiling and upper walls, we used Behr's Table Linen and below the chair rail, we used Castle Path. Table Linen actually has a slight pink tint to it, which I wanted. When else will I get to paint my top-floor corner office pink??? Also, we painted over the brown doors. Granted they were wood, but not a pretty grain or stain and all the original wood trim had already been painted so they didn't match anything. Now they're clean and white, and I love them.

Installing the chair rail definitely took patience. We measured the walls, painted all the trim, cut them with a hand saw and miter box, and then glued and nailed them to the walls. Given the age of the house and the resultant sloping floors and slanted walls on the second floor, caulk was an absolute necessity to make the molding look snug against the wall.