Smaller Spaces

Some progress in our smaller spaces, to share in the midst of some larger progress (Meaning our new backdoors are in, shades from Smith and Noble are mostly in, and front yard landscaping progressed ... as of today. All posts to come!)

UTILITY CLOSET
The below picture was of a super-scary, large walk-in closet off of our kitchen, taken when we bought the house. It housed the hot water heater and not much else anyone would want to see. Every time Mike freaked out wondering "what we'd done" when we first bought this house, he'd reference the dangling wires you see in this photo as one of the signs we should run as fast as possible :)

Utility closet - before

The various architectural plans showed different options for this closet, like turning it into a small office, etc, but we decided to keep it as a closet and make it a space for cleaning supplies and our "cat supplies", meaning we could keep the cats' food and litter box in here, so none of those unsightly things were visible in our house. We installed one of those swinging "doggie" doors on the outside of the closet that the cats could walk through, and started sprucing up the inside with not much but a hammer and paint, and a trip to the Container Store.

I must be one of Container Store's top shoppers this year. I love that place. Mainly because this is what can happen when you shop there:

Utility closet - after! With a happy cat hanging
out waiting to be fed...

It really is the small things sometimes.

OFFICE
I also have been slowly pulling together the little room that we did end up turning into our office.

I am honestly not sure what this room was before. I wish we'd gotten that "before" picture, but it had olive green wood walls with a scalloped border around the molding. There was a rusted metal window with about 9 panes. If that sets the stage at all.

We decided not to invest a lot in this room because if we do add onto this house, this will become a hallway to the new bedroom. So, we added a coat of gloss White Dove to the walls, removed the scalloped border, and added in a solid pane of glass for the window. (this is kind of cheating, since it's not even a working window, but again, this room was looked at more as a temporary fix)

Office after a coat of paint and new window

I had visions of a Sputnik light in here to start. I began the search with ones similar to this at 1st Dibs —prohibitively expensive. DWR's version wasn't a whole lot better, and so the online hunt began. I finally found a site called InMod that made more affordable versions of the Sputnik, and ordered from there.

I am really happy with the quality of the fixture we ended up with from InMod

To go with the Sputnik, I added a mid-century etching that my Dad was tossing out from art school:

Looking past the orange of the previous frame and mat...

...to the new version!

And a wool Safavieh rug from Gilt:

(Chosen to complement the etching)

So here is a shot peeking through the door of the office as with the Sputnik, the rug, and the re-framed etching paired with our Nelson Swag chair, high-gloss West Elm parson's table, and iMac:

A nice little space to work in for now, without a lot of investment

We'll see where it goes from here...