"We need to talk about your TPS reports..."

Okay, if you're reading my post title and wondering... "WHAT????" Then you haven't seen the movie Office Space.  So for those of you who haven't seen it, here's a little something to brighten your day.

Did You Get the Memo?



Office Space
— MOVIECLIPS.com

Baaahaaahaaa!!!  If you work in an office, you get it.  Now to the point.  Why am I putting random clips of Office Space on here?  You guessed it... I'm gonna talk about my office space. :)  My home office space that is...
Until a few weeks ago, the room I had allocated as my home office looked like this...
*Warning- these photos may be distrubing to neat freaks*

Yikes!  I know, I know... it was bad.  This room had turned into a hide away for all of the things that didn't really go anywhere else.  I didn't have a proper desk, so we always just set the laptop up on the island in the kitchen.  That worked okay, but unless we wanted to have a printer in there, we had to drag the laptop in here and balance it in our hands while we printed... not a pretty sight.  Finally I was fed up and decided to do something about it.  So I drug everything out of this room and started sorting.  It literally took me days.  Alot of it went in the trash.  I figured if we hadn't used it since we moved in, we wouldn't be using it at all.  I did find 4 phone books.... does anyone even use 1 phone book?  After everything was clear, I started to paint.  The purpose of this room was an office/ craft/ sewing/ all together creativity room, so I wanted something bright and happy.  I chose orange.  This paint is Olympic Paprika from Lowe's.

After the room was painted, I liked how bright it was, but there was something that I didn't like.  Finally it dawned on me.  The trim.  The orange paint looked horrible with the wood trim!  It was too close to the same color and just had to go. 

My husband is one of those people who thinks painting wood trim is a mortal sin, but since this was going to be my room, I got him to agree to painting it!  You have no idea how much of a feat that was!

Finally the room was painted!  I like it sooo much better with the white trim.  It makes it so much happier in here.

The white trim makes the window pop and really seperates the wall from the floor.  Well, the room is painted, and Chris made me something pretty special to finish it up, but you'll have to wait for my next post to see the rest of this office space re-do.... oh the suspense ;)

Brooke  Y

Initial Thoughts

I've found the most difficult thing in decorating my house has been finding wall art that I like.  A lot of my walls are bare because of this very reason.  I just really can't find alot of things that I like, and most of the stuff I do like is about the distance from here to Mars out of my budget.  So I've challenged myself to DIY some wall art that will not only be very easy on the wallet, but also satisfy my empty walls.  In scouring Pinterest, I've found art with letters and initials.  I love the idea of wall art that means something, so I decided to make some art for the family room with our initials.

 I started out with this frame- it was a steal at Big Lots for only 5 bucks!!

I wanted something besides the white mat, so I headed out to Michael's and grabbed this sheet of scrapbook paper (matches the red wall in the fam room).

The next step was to cut the paper to the size of the mat.  Actually this was the hardest part because I chose striped paper, I had to make sure the stripes all lined up.  It would have been much easier with non-striped paper.  :)   After cutting the paper, I used a glue stick to glue it to the mat that came with the frame.  Then I made a little magic on the computer and printed off our initials!

Put it all together and this is what I got!  I like it!!

Now it came time to decided where it would go.  We have this strange corner wall that ended up being just the right size.

So I took out my handy-dandy Command strips... love these things... seriously.  Chris isn't too fond of the idea of me taking a drill or hammer our walls... I'm a little clumsy at times... so this gives me a way to hang my own frames.  Plus, no damage to my walls when I change my mind!



I made sure it was level and stuck up... I am very pleased with the results :)

So how much did it cost me?  Here's the breakdown.

Frame- $5.00

Scrapbook paper- $1.00

Command strips- $2.50

Total- $8.50!!

Not too bad!

Brooke  Y

Camping In...

It's the last of the house tour and I just have one more room I want to show you for now, the family room.  This is the room where all the fun stuff happens.  It's where us Gillespies get crazy!  (If you call brownies and movie night crazy... and we certainly do!)  This is the room where we spend 90% of our time in the evenings.  And why not??  It has all the fun stuff!  We were having fun with this room even before we moved in... I'll explain later :)  So here are some before shots.

hmmm... not sure what was on my camera lens...

There are those beautiful curtains again.... ugh

We had never had a fireplace before, so we were downright giddy about this one :)

We had the house ready to move into in the winter of 2009.  But, we were missing one thing... electricity!  The electric company took forever and a day to get our electric hooked up... and if you know Chris and I, you know we aren't the most patient of people.  So, we broke out the sleeping bags and the s'mores and camped out in our house.  Okay... there were no s'mores, looking back, there should have been.  It just so happened to be in the middle of a cold snap and blankets didn't help!

We had work lights, a kerosene heater and 2 subs from M.T.O. and we were good to go!



 Don't I look like I'm having fun?  Actually, it was a blast... that face is just frozen like that!

Yes, we had our pool table before we had electricity... don't judge us...

We finally got electricty and heat!  Then we started painting.

The whole time I was painting that red wall I was thinking, "My dad would never have let me do this at home!"  Insert sneaky laugh here.

And finally... here is the family room now.

This wall contains Chris' pride and joy.... and the bane of my existence.  Actually the deer don't bother me too much, but 2 is the limit.

We still have a lot of work to do in here.  The drywallers came and patched some cracks that we had, and when we touched up the paint, it didn't blend well.  So, we will be re-painting the Khaki at some point.  Luckily the red wall didn't need any repairs, so it is still okay.  I want some type of console table to go under the deer to fill in the void and eventually I would like to do some built-ins on either side of the fireplace.  For now, this room has turned into a cozy retreat.  Now to get more wall art for in there... there's alot of wall space that needs filled!

Brooke  Y