Office Progress and Plans for the Future

Hello everyone!  I'm back with another update on the apartment.  About a month ago, I showed you guys a full tour of the apartment and what a disaster zone it was.  Since then, we've been plugging along, slowly getting things whipped into shape.  It is by no means close to being finished, but it's getting a little more live-in-able every day.  To remind you, here is a peak at what you saw when walking into the office a month ago:

Since then, we've thankfully gotten things a little more in shape.  So now when you walk in the door, you're greeted with this view:

We have been working tirelessly to unpack boxes and get things set up in here.  The office was one of the rooms we were most excited about gaining with this move, so it is one of the rooms that has gotten the most attention.  And words cannot describe the feeling when you can finally see your floor again and walk into a room without playing hop-scotch!

The left wall and the area under the window have been designated as "Melissa's side of the room".  Since this is a shared space, we wanted to make sure we both had equal and ample room to spread out our officey stuff (otherwise I may or may not take up the entire room ;).

The window area is one spot in the room that still needs major attention.  First and foremost we want to add curtains to the window.  We're kind of stalled on that, however, until we figure out the color palette and design scheme of the room.  We're toying with the idea of splitting the room down the middle, her side being blue and mine pink for example, with some combining elements like the curtains and rug that are both colors.  Melissa thinks it would look really cool, I'm not fully sold on the idea.  We'll see where we end up.

Eventually we're also hoping to get some sort of piece of furniture to go under the window.  We would like something with additional surface space, both so I can take pictures right by the window, and so Melissa has more room to spread out when working.  We also want to add in some extra storage options in that corner, since Melissa currently only has those drawers in her desk for storage and organization.

Finally we're planning to hang stuff above and around the wall behind Melissa's desk.  Since this is her space, she gets the final say, but we like to work together on all things home decor since ultimately the whole apartment is both of ours' space.  So far we've discussed shelves, art and a large dry erase calendar as some of the options for going above the desk.

The far right corner of the room is my "area".  I love the offices on Pinterest with wrap around built in desks, so I'm trying my hand at piecing together my furniture for that look.  I'm not completely sold on keeping the layout exactly how it is, but I'm liking the direction its heading.

Especially since just about a month ago, this is what my little corner looked like:

I'm also planning to add a bunch of stuff on the wall above my workspace.  I'd like to dedicate the space directly above my desk to be a frame gallery of inspirational images and quotes.  Since this is where I'll be doing all my crafting and blogging, I want this corner of the apartment to be the most inspiring and motivating area I can make it.  I already have a few things ready to be framed and hung, but I'm still waiting to collect a few more before I finalize an arrangement and started putting holes in the wall.

I'm also working on moving the Recollections storage cubes that are currently on my Alex (the drawers to the right of the desk) to somewhere else.  I'm not sure where they'll end up, but I'm actually playing with an idea I have for getting them in the closet.  Once they're relocated, I'm planning to hang my Pottery Barn style tiles system above the Alex.  This way I'll get a little function out of my wall space, since the area above my desk will be purely for style purposes.

The final area in the office is the closet wall.  For a good chunk of time after moving in, we didn't really touch these babies.  I had my dresses hung in there until I could move them to the master closet, and that was pretty much it.  As you can see below, they weren't exactly accessible:

They're still in the very beginning stages (read: we haven't done anything beyond shoving random homeless items in there), but at least they're clean and clear and ready to be filled up once we decide what to do with them.

We again split up the closets, so the one on the left is all me.  Since we don't need these closets for their usual purpose, I really want to use them to add a ton of extra office storage to the space.  Like I mentioned earlier in the post, I'm working on possibly moving my Recollections storage cubes into my closet.  I'm thinking about making a faux-built-in desk area in my side of the closet, by stacking a couple of the cubes and rest a table top on top of them.  I would like to have two towers of cubes at each end of my closet, with a space in between them to store my Raskog.

Since the cubes come in a variety of different styles, I can customize this little 'desk' to store exactly what I need it to.  I'm thinking I may make this area my official Project Life desk once I get around to setting it up.  I like leaving my layouts out while I'm working on them, which eats up about a quarter of my desk space any given day.  With this added surface space, I can leave out a layout until it's finished, without sacrificing any functional desk space.

So there's where we are with our office.  It's no where near being completely, but I am just so happy to be able to sit down at my desk and actually use the office as an office, as opposed to the storage locker is was for two months.  Anyone else been reclaiming any rooms recently?  How about using closets to store things other than clothes?  This will be my first opportunity to set up a closet-desk and I'm super pumped to get started.  What do you guys think about the idea of splitting up a shared room by color?  Let me know in the comments!