THE ROOM TOUR YOU NEVER SAW

This post has been in my “drafts” forever so you probably don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll recap for you…

BACKGROUND INFO

Three years ago, we left our little flat in Brussels to live in a small city in the eastern part of the country. (I’m from Belgium in case you are wondering…) It was a big change because we moved into a HOUSE that has many many rooms.

The house needed a bit of work as I hated the kitchen and most of the rooms’ paint colours. We had to deep clean everything because everything was filthy: the previous occupants had so much stuff it was hard for them to keep everything tidy. We changed the flooring in both bedrooms, in the kitchen, and in the office. We completely redid the kitchen by ourselves…  If you want to see some photos, you can find all the posts I wrote about the work we did here.

THE OFFICE “BEFORE”

First things first, I feel like I need to tell you the truth… We don’t use this room as an office anymore. As it’s the first room when you enter the house, we use it to store our bikes and our cat’s litter box. We drop off our bags, our coats and store our shoes in there as well, so its main function now is to be an “entryway”…

The “before” photos look pretty bad because of the orange walls… It was hurting my eyes so much! Some plastering work needed to be done around the windows and the flooring was in a really bad shape as well as being super ugly. Also, we were storing lots of things in there while we were redoing other parts of the house.

We store our shoes in the wooden cabinet. I got it off second hand and need to sand it down but I haven’t got around to doing it yet. It’s a bit too orangey-looking for my taste… We layed down the flooring ourselves with left over wood planks my father-in-law had in his garage. I’m not a fan of the colour but it’s good quality and it was free so we couldn’t pass it up.

WHITE, BEIGE AND WOOD TONES

At the time, I was in a hurry to get this room done because I was writing my end of the year paper and I wanted to have my dedicated workspace. Since I had discovered Made.com, I wanted to buy “real furniture” instead of going to Ikea. I had spotted a few pieces that I thought would go well with my colour scheme “white, beige and wood tones”. Moving into this house was my perfect opportunity to buy new pieces of furniture so I went crazy and ordered a bookcase, a new office chair, and some lamps.

I found the cute lampshade at Maisons du Monde, we bought the print at the Tate Modern shop on our last trip to London and the world map corkboard is from Notonthehighstreet.com. If money was not an issue, I would have gone a little overboard with the accessories and office supplies. Unfortunately, I’m too reasonable in that area and I have not overstyled the shelves with super pretty boxes and trinkets… but I’d love the room to look more glamourous!

DIY DESK

We actually built the desk ourselves to save us some money. At first, my idea was to buy two trestles from Habitat because I loved the look but I then I thought it was too expensive. We ended buying a nice and thick wooden board and built the trestles ourselves. I painted the trestles white and left the wood as is. It fits perfectly against that wall and it’s super easy to move. What I love most about it, it’s that we have plenty of space for our legs!

Overall, I’m happy at how everything turned out. It’s a shame we don’t use this room as an office anymore because the light is really nice in there. Alas, we’ve discovered that an office/entryway is not practical for us. I would probably do it another way if I were to start decorating this room again and if I had a bigger budget. I love so many things!