Hello! And happy 2025! I can’t believe I’m sitting down after over a year to write in my little space of the internet. It only took over 365 days, buying my first house, getting a new job, fostering cats, traveling overseas for the first time, and helping Annie recover from surgery to get me back on here. Not too much has happened since the last time you saw me, clearly. What really pushed me to come back is my first ever home project. A DIY office renovation. Sort of.
If you’ve come here to learn how to complete a home project correctly, I am sorry but you have come to the wrong place. I’m going to tell a story of what happened, I’m not going to tell you how to do it. Because honestly? I don’t even know how to do it. I just did it. I watched a bunch of TikToks (RIP but also not RIP what a wild 24 hours it has been with TikTok) and read quite a few blogs. Then I took little pieces of what all of those videos and blogs said and picked out the parts I wanted to utilize. And viola, we have an office reno and a DIY bench.
Now, let’s go back to the beginning. All the way back to March of 2024. I bought my first house! A year before that if you had asked me what I wanted the interior of my house to look like I would have said all greys or neutrals or whatever. Millennial grey if you will. But then I lived in a house built in the 1920s for about a year and I fell in love with all of the charm and personality that house held. I no longer wanted the Millennial grey. Then I bought my house. And it was nothing but Millennial grey. Grey walls, grey floors, white ceilings. In every.single.room. And if that’s your choice of interior design that is so great and I truly love that for you. However, it’s not what I want in my home. So then I started to think about what room I should tackle first. And my office seemed like a great place to start. It’s probably the room I spend the most amount of time in so I wanted it to be a place I loved to be in. Take a peek at what the office looked like before (these pics are from the listing of the house, not what I had the office looking like but you get the idea).
Next step? Researching different types of offices and deciding what I wanted mine to look like. I am obsessed with color drenching rooms. I did it in two closets when I moved in and I just love it. So I knew I wanted to color drench this room. I also knew I wanted it to be a darker green color. Millennial grey is turning into Millennial green and I’m not mad about it. I went to Home Depot and bought 3 paint samples. Why are paint samples so expensive and why do they give you so much? I needed one swipe of each. Now I have a bunch of paint in three colors I will never use. Anyway…
I put these three up on the wall at night and snapped pics of them at night and then in the daylight to make my decision. I also asked for a few opinions and went with the one they all told me not to. They’ll probably never provide me their opinion again. Next step? Painting. I hated painting. I got two coats on the ceiling. The textured ceiling. As well as one coat on one of the walls. And then I called my Mom. Because I was very much over it and saw no end in site. So she came in and painted two walls for me while I painted another wall and the closet. Then painting was done.
Once the painting was done I had to figure out what I wanted to do with the closet. Keep it a closet was out of the question. I don’t use it and I don’t need a closet in my office. So I scrolled TikTok yet again watching a ton of videos on what people had done with their closets. I took a ton of screenshots from Pinterest as well. I decided on a built-in-bench with storage and a few book shelves. I watched so many people do it themselves on TikTok that I just knew I could do it. I took measurements and threw them into ChatGPT, told it what I wanted to do, and it gave me all board sizes I needed. Off to Lowes I went. Shoutout to Jim at Lowes for all of his help with cutting all of the wood I needed!! Peep Stanley also helping me decided what pieces needed to go where. Always such a helper, that one.
Once I got all of the wood home, I started setting it up. And quickly realized I had told ChatGPT wrong or it told me wrong or whatever I don’t care who got it wrong but it was wrong. I realized this at like 8pm on a Saturday before we were about to be snowed in for almost a week. I was going to lose it if I wasn’t able to work on this damn bench during that time so off to my sister’s house to get their saw so I could cut these dang pieces of wood myself. Did I know how to use the saw? No. Did I use it correctly? Also no. I have no photos of this but let’s just say anyone who knows even remotely what they are doing would have died watching me cut these 2x4s wearing blue light blocking glasses and using a step stool to hold the board down while I went straight down onto the board. I was so confused why the saw kept kicking back and thought “this is unsafe”. Then realized I was supposed to glide onto the wood. Thankfully I had a few extra pieces of 2×4 because I messed up a couple. But! I got it done and it was all cut correctly, finally.
With the bench semi-built, I needed to figure out what I was going to do with the front as well as what fabric I was going to put on the seat. I had also looked into wallpaper incase I didn’t like the all green. I need to know why almost all fabric and wallpaper is SO busy. It overwhelms me so fast there’s no way I could have 99% of any wallpaper or fabric in this room. Thankfully, my sister stepped in and found the absolute perfect fabric for this bench. Once that was ordered, I needed to put something on the front of the bench and grab wood for the shelves. I ended up heading to Home Depot yet again (people don’t lie when they say home projects take about 10 trips to the hardware store) for some beadboard and shelves and everything else to get this done.
Then I called in more reinforcements for this DIY office renovation. I believe I could have gotten the shelves and the bench seat done myself but at this point I had spent so much time working on this office that I needed it to just be done. So my brother-in-law came over and while my mom watched my nephews, him and I got to work. We got the bench seat all done, the shelves stained, and then the shelves hung up. I was so happy to have it finally all complete. It looked beautiful. Notice I’m talking in the past tense? Yeah that’s because….
After it was all said and done my sister, brother-in-law, and I decided we need to do a Trader Joe’s run. And while over there I decided I was going to go shopping for a few decorations for the shelves. I was gone for a few hours and couldn’t wait to get home to put these new decorations on the shelves that I had built by hand, kind of. But then I got home and turned on the lights in the office only to discover that I had drilled all the way through my wall into the other side of the wall in the living room which meant (I think, again, not an expert) that the anchors I put in had nothing to hold onto. Thus, the shelf fell, breaking one of my favorite skulls as well as putting some decent sized holes in both sides of the wall. Which meant I had to take down the entire shelf, fill in the holes, repaint, drill new holes, and pray I did it right this time.
And that brings us to today. The DIY office renovation is complete. The shelves held up overnight. I put a few decorations (unbreakable ones) on it to see how it did overnight and so far so good. I’m now testing my luck by putting actual decorations and books on both shelves. Holding my breath for now. But if they fall, they fall. And I will repair and figure something else out. However, now that it’s actually done (minus a new light fixture and a new rug) I can say I am actually really proud of myself and the fact that I did this project almost completely on my own. Also, shoutout to the family for helping me along the way so I didn’t absolutely lose my mind. Annie now has a new spot to lay while I work, I now have a room I am in love with in this house, and my books can come up from the basement finally.
If you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading all of this and going through that journey with me. It was quite a journey over the last few weeks and I am so happy it’s over. I have a love/hate relationship with this project which means I am already trying to think of what to do with the next room. I also have a ton of wood left over from this that needs to be used somewhere. Maybe every single room will get some bookshelves. Kidding. Kind of.
Stayed tuned for the next home reno project or whatever I decided to write about on this here little blog of mine. Hopefully it won’t be another year+ before you hear from me again!
