Princess Desk and Room

This princess room clearly needed a desk space for the little student. As with the rest of the room, the built-ins and the knee walls with doors to our storage cubbies meant that there wasn't a lot of space to work with, so D decided that this built-in should come out and a custom desk would go in. 

Demolition was surprisingly easy, so we didn't get any pictures of it. Just about everything could be pulled by hand or with a pry bar. There were spots that made us go "huh" though, as with any old house. We learned that the trim on the outside of the built-in was higher than the trim on the inside, which wasn't noticeable until we removed the vertical framing. D trimmed a piece from the front of the built-in to fit and inserted it, plus fitted a piece of wood trim. The floor also had missing pieces, and you can see from this picture that he added a small rectangle to fill in where the vertical front pieces of the built-in had been set into the floor:

We found a deeply discounted desk pedestal from Ballard Designs and then created a ledge to the height of that pedestal by screwing some pine boards around the perimeter into the studs. 

The most challenging (well, scary) part of the whole process was measuring over and over and then cutting the $99 "Floor and Decor" butcher block countertop to the right width. Then ripping it (shearing off a thin slice/plane) as it was a bit too deep for desk usage. The Bosch track saw made it a fairly easy process to make it thinner. Then D eye-balled a few different roundover bits we owned and ran a hand-held router across the front and side edge to give a nice rounded effect. He finished with Danish oil. He started with a very old can which was a huge mistake as it just went on sticky. And stayed sticky. So he had to run some mineral spirits across the board to de-sticky it. Then finish it again with a new(er) can. Still took several very smelly days in the basement (as it was winter there was no hope of using the outside or garage to cure) to get the smell in a sort of OK state--enough to put in a bedroom. For a while, we could smell it (from the basement) in most of the main floor of the house:

The middle hole in the floor was especially challenging to fill in because it got wider as you went deeper. I guess the contractor wanted some wiggle room when they installed the original bench / shelves. It was far too thin at the edges to keep as is, so D took a chisel and carefully widened the hole until the existing wood felt sturdy enough. Then he used some leftover oak flooring from our primary suite addition and cut it to friction-fit into the spot. The finish of course does not match, but no one is likely to notice until the next homeowner or future us rips out the desk.

And here it is, in all its glory. There's a charging station (I think my kids have more devices than I do) and lots of space to work (at least when she puts her junk away).

Without further ado, the rest of the room. You'll recognize the dressers and the bed, now with optional canopy attachment, from the guest room. Moving it up here is what allowed us to empty that room out and put in a Murphy bed instead. (The kids both knew it was now-or-never on this bedroom set--either one of them was taking it or it was going to be sold off.) This was my canopy bed and furniture set from the 1980s and apparently the multitudes of unicorn and Strawberry Shortcake canopies of my era just do not exist anymore. (I think they can be a health hazard because of how dusty they can get--so I try to shake this one off and dust the frame when I change the sheets.) This was one of very few I could find on Amazon, but fortunately, the room recipient loves it.

And of course we added another special touch to make the room even more magical:

And so as we enter 2026, I think I have finally caught up with all the bedroom upgrades that we made as a result of the new addition (guest room and both kid rooms). This all took place primarily in the last few hectic months of 2024, so you can see why we were too busy "doing" to be "writing."

Feeling Crafty

Our guest room, a room where we slept for our first few months in our new home, has served us well over the years. It was one of the first rooms we painted before we moved in and one of the few room that we redecorated after getting it the way we though we wanted (granted, the changes just involved linens and lamps, but it felt dramatic). It served us well during the pandemic when we ended up with a long-term house guest. But through it all, it always felt like a large amount of space dedicated to a spare room that gets used for a grand total of probably two weeks per year in normal circumstances. That said, we didn't want to convert it completely away from a bedroom, since it is obviously pretty handy for those two weeks. Most of the time though, it felt like an underused space, especially on the days that D and J both ended up working from home while hiding from the children (J had to get hers done up in the master bedroom since the kitchen desk was much too accessible for constant rounds of "MOM, can you...?")

There wasn't a ton of space to work with--here's the bed and night stands:

And here's the double dresser. Under the window (not visible) is a cedar chest.

All the furniture was being used, so there was no easy way to gain space. Unless you treat the trunk like a seat for a desk/sewing table.

That seems like a relatively easy choice, but it turned out that the 37.5''-wide chest was just a little too wide for almost EVERY desk that we liked. Even though the desks, which averaged about 42'', seemed sufficient, most of the legs were set in from the edge by a few inches or tapered in at the bottom. The worst part was that many websites didn't even post that particular dimension, making it very hard to decide what would work.

Finally, we found one, a "campaign" desk from Target that fit perfectly (since we also couldn't choose a giant desk since it still had to fit along the wall). Of course I immediately put it to use.

We made this work by removing the mirror from the dresser and putting it under the windows. Due to how the closet door opens, it isn't centered on the wall, but it works pretty well there.

Though of course removing the mirror from the dresser meant we needed a mirror in the room (trust me, NOT having a mirror wasn't an option, as the kids' loved to play dress up and then get on the bed and dance in front of the dresser mirror). We found a "cheval" mirror (seriously, all these styles of furniture apparently have names) on Overstock that fit the bill. 

To gain more space in the room, we also removed one nightstand to allow us to push the bed closer to the wall. Now it is just far enough from the wall to let us get in easily to change the sheets. We shifted the bed exactly enough to give us room to move the rightmost picture of the tryptic over to the left.

You'll notice from the picture of my new desk/sewing table that we suddenly have a VERY LARGE GRAY WALL. Now the fun begins. What should I put there? I have a wall-mounted thread rack that probably needs to get moved from the office where I store all my crafts/hobbies but do not have space to actually work.

Should I just hang pictures (I have no more art nouveau but I have a pretty cool picture of sheep that helps tie the sewing area to my knitting hobby)? Should I get extra crafty and create a Pinterest-worthy pegboard for ribbons, elastic cords, and all other trimmings? I'm leaning towards the former, because I feel like shelving and pegboards can get messy quickly, but if you have an idea, please share it!

Desk organization

My desk was a disaster. I didn't take a before picture of the whole thing because it had lots of stuff I would have to "fuzz" out, but trust me when I say there were just piles of papers - some that needed permanent filing, some that needed addressing (i.e. bills, summer kindergarten assignments), some that needed surreptitious trashing (children's art). I have still been using the mesh wall hanger that you can see in this picture from during our remodel. Except that because we now have a backsplash, I have been keeping it propped up against the wall, precariously balanced. All the papers theoretically go in there, but without a way to organize them and because the whole thing keeps falling, I also end up just stacking things in piles. I almost lost a gift card in the stack. I was constantly worried I would miss one of our few paper bills. It was getting bad.

I have shelves built in above the desk area, but the size of all the cubbies makes it hard to do anything practical with them. So filling the space I have, I stockpile folded up receipts, expired meds for the next give-back day, $1 bills for my daughter's allowance, old greeting cards, etc. But no full sized papers - which is the one thing that I seem to accumulate. It was time to make this a more usable space.

It was clear that these were assembled as two "H"-shaped units, so we thought (hoped!) that removing one of them would leave everything else unharmed. We used a keyhole saw and started sawing into one side of the structure.

 A little more, and then a little more than that, working in slow chunks:

When we got enough of the vertical pieces out, the rest came out pretty easily. Still the whole thing was slow going, since we didn't want to ruin any of the finish.

Then we were left with the nails sticking out from below. We managed to hammer a couple of them out from the top. D leveled the others with a dremel.

The shelf looks smooth and evenly stained without the inner structure, fortunately, as expected. You would never know the letter-holder-sized organizer was ever there.

Here it is now, with two document trays stacked inside, purchased after careful measuring. The shelf is about 11'' deep - an annoyingly precise depth that meant that while a paper could fit in there long-wise (so that the 8.5'' side faced out), an organizer slightly LARGER than a paper would stick out (most of the document trays were 12-14'' long). So I opted to buy trays that are open on the long side, though that meant less real estate inside the shelf. I was able to squeeze two in there, because while the clearance was only 4.5'' to the top lip, beyond that first half inch, inside was almost 6'' high.

It's not perfect of course - I'm still a victim of my own flawed organizational skills. But I have two distinct full-sized shelves, plus a couple of folders, to sort papers. It definitely makes the space more helpful for the types of things I actually need to store there.

Meanwhile (as you can see from the bottom right corner of the photo above), I'm still using the once-upon-a-time-wall-mounted organizer. I had purchased a version matching the document trays that would actually stand up on a flat base, but it turned out to be envelope-sized, rather than full-sized. And that was exactly the size that I *don't* actually need to help me organize. So I need a similar item that would hold normal 8.5x11'' paper. I haven't been able to find one - so please let me know if you come across something.

As usual, we've been so busy around the house that I've had trouble finding time to post. But I have a few projects lined up to talk about. AND we are filing our shed permit paperwork TODAY. So more on that soon as well.

An Office Once More

When last we left off on the office, it didn't look much like an office, there being no more desk. So my preschooler could be forgiven for calling it "her office" when giving newcomers tours of our house. This is the picture we posted here last February.

Since then, we cleared out and got rid of the tall cabinet that you see on the right, and the vintage desk chair (that one was a little painful to part with). We bought a storage bench from Ikea, another Stuva, like the system up in the kids' room - it has the Folja drawer since that was all that was in stock at the time (and anyway, the colorful handles are cute). Apparently I never got a picture like that before we moved on to step 3.

Step 3 entailed the big ticket item that lets us reclaim this room as a proper office - a new desk. D, who actually does work from home sometimes and has been just sitting on the sofa with his laptop, thought it was finally time to get a proper place to do work. After some research on the Wirecutter, our constant source for shopping recommendations, we bought the Jarvis sit/stand bamboo desk from Fully.

That prompted us to do a little more rearranging of the cabinets and....voila!

A real office again! Just ignore all the toys...