New Year, New Project: My First DIY of 2025

Check out what has me feeling so excited and hopeful as I dive into the new year with an open and healing heart in my first project of 2025!

 

I am feeling so excited. More excited than I have been in a while about anything.

What’s making me so excited?

Diving into my first real project since my husband passed away. And the best part is it will allow me to exist in the same space where he thrived and was building his dream every day.

Ok, so what am I working on?

His office.

His sad, empty, uninspiring office.

I have recently decided to move my office into his office. Memories and feelings of him are so strong in there and now I want to thrive and build my dreams in the same space as he did to be just a little closer to him.

But honestly, it’s kind of hard.

I can still hear him on his Zoom calls and laughing at a funny joke his buddy told him. He had this little belly laugh and scrunched up his nose with a clap of his hands when he heard something funny. I can visualize it as I tell you about it!

About a year before he passed, my son moved his office in there to work alongside his dad on a special project. I could hear them sharing ideas and debating for fun. Any debate would spill over into their lunch break and echo through the house as they made sandwiches together.

Now this office sits empty. No laughing or debating. No Zoom calls or brainstorming sessions.

My son moved his office to a different space and now there is nothing.

Nothing but the light of the sun illuminating the emptiness.

I wish so much for it to be full of those things again, but it never will be.

So I have decided that there needs to be a change and that I will take over my husband’s empty office to build my dream office and craft room/creative space and breathe life into it once again.

The room right now

Currently, it is a hodge podge of things.

All of my husband’s plants that he loved so much have been sitting on a table under the window. His favorite leather recliner, an old lamp, some art randomly scattered across the room that is hung too high, a bronze statue, an empty TV mount….the little list goes on and on.

Right before he went into the hospital I told him I was going to zhush it up. He was ready for my special touch to make it more inviting and a true office for him. My plans included built-ins, a conference table, his awards from his past work, and so many other things. But I never got the chance to do that for him and that makes me so sad.

Over the holidays I set up a random dining table on an empty wall to wrap gifts and do holiday crafts on, and shoved a bunch of random items in the room to “deal with after the holidays”. Well, the holidays are over. So it is time to deal with them.

Along with all of the random things currently in the space sits the temporary IKEA desk I had at the bottom of the stairs, complete with a warped butcher block top that I use as my desk. One day I brought it up and replaced his desk with it because I couldn’t bear to look at his desk anymore.

The flood of memories of him sitting there would come back to me. Of him working, chatting with me, calling me in to say “hello” to someone on a Zoom call, telling me a joke….I just couldn’t take it. It was more bitter than sweet.

I broke down in tears every time I would go into his office and saw all of his computer monitors, his favorite pen, his scribbles on a note pad, along with his unfinished work so I had to move it out. But, as you can see, it is not a very inspiring space.

Even that Herman Miller chair is sad. He loved that darn chair, but I always thought it was so ugly! It looks like a skeleton to me and, even though it was expensive, it is not that comfortable.

What do I want in the space?

Not any of THIS! This is not sparking any joy.

There is nothing inspiring me to hang out in there. It is a place where I go to work on my computer and then I get out as fast as I can.

Since I love and have always loved crafting, and have shelves of supplies in the storage room, I want one place where I can have everything at my fingertips. I was frustrated this holiday season because I couldn’t find the things I was looking for when I went to do some cute little crafts.

So I will build plenty of storage into the space and know exactly where everything is and make it pretty so that I WANT to hang out in there.

I have been waiting and wanting to build a creative space/office for myself ever since we moved into our home 4.5 years ago. I have had the room picked out in another part of the house to create it, but with everything going on with life I just never got the opportunity to do it.

What’s the plan?

 

Phase One.

There are two sides to the room that I am going to utilize for built-ins. I always sketch out my thoughts in my project journal to get all of my ideas down as I dream.

On one side I am going to build two large standing cabinets floor to ceiling with doors and a bank of lower cabinets with drawers and a countertop right under a window that gets great light.

I want to flank the window above the counter with sconces for additional beauty and function and add a couple of electrical outlets above the counter for things like my Cricut and glue gun.

I also need to add a chandelier to the center of the room. The room has NO lighting after it gets dark at all right now. No chandelier, no canned lights, nothing except for a couple of dim lamps so it is hard to work in there in the evenings.

Phase Two.

On the opposite wall I want to build my office desk, my files. Yes, I am a paper girly because I don’t trust myself with my computer and am afraid that I will lose important digital documents!

Then I want a sewing table for my sewing machine to sit on. I would love to be able to just sit and sew whenever I want to instead of going to the basement, dragging it out of the storage room, and putting it on the dining room table for an undetermined amount of time. If I am working on something I can leave it out and just shut the door!

What will that look like? I want to run a long desk down the entire 13′ wall. One end of it will be my computer desk and the other will be my sewing table.

I will incorporate a filing cabinet and more storage in between the two desks to divide them, and a tall cabinet with doors on top.

I have stood in this room at all times of the day and settled on where I want everything based on how the sunlight streams in. I don’t want the glare on my computer screen or to get too hot when sitting in my chair as the summer sun streams in.

Phase Three.

In the middle of the room I eventually want to build the most beautiful island with turned legs and drawers. Something like this, but scaled to the room and not $2000!

 

I will build the island for additional storage and seating and replace the carpet with the same hardwood floors that run through the rest of the house.

Of course, the cabinets will be painted a beautiful color (I’m leaning towards blue), the walls will have wallpaper, and the sconce lighting will have the cutest shades!  I cannot wait for it all to come together!

I can’t decide on which blue. The front of my house is white with the cutest blue front door. You can see this office from the front of my house so I think it will be so pretty to make the room blend with the colors on the exterior.

I made a preliminary mood board to see what kind of color and finishes I like for the space. I ordered a few different wallpaper samples so this might not even be the one I go with, but we will see. I will share more on IG stories!

The pattern is large scale so I think it could be really pretty! Notice how each shade of blue looks so different with the wallpaper pattern. And the samples look so different in my actual room than they look in this mood board. There are a lot of things to consider.

Eventually I would like to change out all of my wood flooring in the whole house to something warmer and similar to the one in this mood board. But that is a HUGE project that I will tackle another time so for now it will be carpet in a similar shade to this flooring.

The color Upward was Sherwin Williams Color of the Year for 2024. I found so many beautiful wallpapers that go with Upward!

In the last house that we built (and that I thought we were going to be in forever), I built the most beautiful and functional craft room/office that I had been dreaming about. It took me 5.5 months to build every piece, from drawers to countertops, from scratch and I LOVED it!

I was terrified to build it, but I wanted it so badly and it was soooooo expensive to have someone else do it for me. It was so worth every ounce of worry and effort!

I have always been a DIYer of some sort from the time I was in my teens, but this was my first really big project with really big saws and the one that I truly cut my DIY teeth on. With the skills I learned from that build, I have been able to create so many more amazing spaces.

And I never have to be afraid again! The more I do, I just keep getting better and better!

In that space, I had everything I ever wanted in a craft room/office. A few things I customized and incorporated into the room were antique card catalogs that I found on Craigslist (before they were cool and a hot item), and built them into cabinets, along with a whole gift wrapping cabinet and a customized cabinet for my cutting mats.

 

 

Check out the journey of building my craft room from scratch.

I poured my heart and soul into it and cried when we sold that house.

I plan to be here in this house for a long time so I have decided to make it exactly what I want to live in for however many years I will be here.

And add the wallpaper I have been dreaming of. YOLO!

I hope you follow along with this build! I am so excited for what it will mean for me and I hope it inspires you to finally change something in your space to bring yourself joy, no matter how little it is.

You can keep up with me daily over in stories on Instagram where I share the actual process real-time….wins and fails.

Remember, you can do it yourself, but let’s do it together!