I like coming up with ideas for the home. I love thinking up little projects but rarely do they ever come to fruition. However, one thing I vowed to get done this summer was to repaint our office. It’s probably the one room where we spend most of our time, since it’s where both of our computers are located and doubles as our radio “studio.” I had a complete image in my head of what I wanted to see the office become and painting was the first step.

Painting is by far the easiest and cheapest way to completely change a room, and boy did this office need it. When we moved in to the house five years ago we did what most people probably do and gave everyone room a fresh coat of paint – neutral paint. Shy of our “master” bathroom, which is bright green, the rest of the house is pretty standard issue off white or close to it. It serves its purpose but not until you add some color to a room do you realize how blah it was before.

For this office I wanted to go with the trendy two-color room, where one wall is one color and the other three all match. I wanted one wall to be brown and the others some sort of blue/green/teal color. I grabbed a few samples from the Home Depot and we picked out a nice blue-teal color to go along with a kick ass chocolate brown. I dusted off the old power painter and knocked it out in a weekend.

Let me speak on power painters here for a moment. Power rollers are to painting as buses are to transportation. It saves effort but not time. The power roller does take less time to paint the actual walls, but the time you save there is spent cleaning the damn thing. With all the hoses and pumps it takes a long, long time to clean it out so you can use the next color of paint. They’re also quite heavy to use, far more so than your normal manual paint roller, but it does save you the time of reloading your roller with paint. If you happen to come across a power roller (like we did) then fine, use it, but I can’t recommend one if you’re an average home owner like us.

Anyway, with painting comes the need for cleaning. Honestly, the office might have just needed a little rearranging and cleaning more than a painting, but combined and the result is just awesome. Not only does the room feel a little more hip, it is so much so that I want to spend more time working there. Everything just clicked with this redo and the rest of the house better watch out because with this success I’m scoping out rooms to attack next.

But as chance would have it, one office is not enough for us. Oh no, with Jen now working from the home as an on-line teacher, she needed her own office. The on-line school provides here with a whole setup of computers and equipment so she needed it…and the room needed it. I wish I had taken some before shots of the room, which up to this point has served as little more than a giant litter box for the cat.

We simply called it “Frankie’s Room” since that’s the only being that really used it. The room was otherwise a junk room where we stashed stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere else, the junk drawer of rooms. Much like the other office, it needed a good cleaning and straightening up more than anything.

This was really a transformation more than anything. It didn’t need any new paint but it needed a lot of help otherwise, namely furniture. I’m a guy that likes his desk space and knowing how Jen organizes and works I knew she needed space too, but desks are an peculiar animal. It was seemingly hard to find a desk that offered a lot of space for a decent price. Some desks had lots of hutch-type space with cabinets and drawers, but didn’t offer much honest desktop, and those that had desktop just weren’t very big, they were more computer desks than work desks.

Finding a desk for less than $150 was seemingly a lost cause until we stopped in Staples on a whim. We found the hutch desks and computer desks, all of which were $160 or more and I wasn’t happy with any of them. A few were acceptable but they were not what was in my head. But on about the third trip around the floor models one finally jumped out at us.

Actually, the price is what jumped out at us – $100 – for what appeared to be a full L-shaped desk setup. I honestly couldn’t believe it was $100 for what was essentially two desks in one. After confirming the price with the clerk we couldn’t not buy it. It was almost too perfect and I almost went back to get another one for myself. The L-shape fit perfectly in what was an otherwise empty room. We had plenty of room to play and it all turned out great, so now Jen has a great place to work without too much distraction…at least not toy distractions, the dogs will probably be another story.

Along with the full blown room makeovers we did a little wall decoration. We already have some CD covers on the wall to show off a little of our tastes, but when we found a stack of LPs while cleaning we knew we had to make something of them. Hello wall art! Some $10 frames at Michael’s and we have instant wall art we can change any time we like. We have a lot of bare walls in the house but as we throw up more art and posters I realize that if not overdone they really add to the space.

All in all, fixing up dull rooms into rooms you can honestly enjoy is very rewarding. It’s simple and relatively cheap, but requires some simple planning a minimal time investment. I still wish we had matching or at least uniform desks in the main office, but that’s all “wants” and not “needs,” but the room needed a makeover. There is still some fine tuning to do, but all I can say is color makes all the difference. It’s amazing how a set of colors can effect your mood.