The Guest Room and Our Affair with World Market

Recently, we discovered an amazing little store here in Myrtle Beach, called World Market. I must admit, we got their ad, and walked in basically expecting a Christmas Tree Shop. What we found pleasantly surprised us. Since our discovery 2 weeks ago, we've been back about 5 times, and I feel like we've purchased something each and every time.

First, it started with these adorable elephant paper lanterns. For those that don't know, I'm a sucker for paper lanterns, as I find them unique adorable.

We've been trying to do something with our guest room for some time now, and these elephant lanterns really hit the spot in terms of the color scheme that we were going for. All was well and good, and we hadn't gotten too carried away, when I found this rug:

I just love it, it's got all of the colors we were hoping to incorporate into the room. For a better shot of the rug, we've taken a close up below: 

Unable to stay away, I was bored at home, and decided that the World Market website was how I'd like to spend my time. That's when I ran across the Studio Day Sofa. With amazing reviews, and a great look, I found that the dimensions fit exactly into our window alcove. We've been looking for something more "chair-like" so that when we don't have guests, our office feels like an office, and when we do have guests, we have something that feels really welcoming.

It was on sale, and ... I had a coupon, so we made our way down to the World Market to check it out. We loved it! We snatched it up right there, and came home and put it together.

Then, we started putting the pieces together, picked up some great gray curtains (for tie in with our rug!) from the JCPenney, on sale for 50% off. Altogether, I'm so happy with the way that it turned out, that I'm considering staying in there myself!

It's a little washed out right now, because of the amount of light that comes in through the window, but I will take some more photos soon, of the area during the nighttime and early am. Here are some zoomed in shots of the area. Oh - and for anyone who's interested, that's our king sized gray blanket that we scored at Target for $22. It was a steal!

We just love how welcoming it all feels. With the pillows removed, and the sides folded down, it's an amazingly comfy little sleeping space, about the size of a twin bed. Oh, and when we stopped into the World Market today, the manager asked us how everything went with the set up. It's those little things that keep us going back. 

Anyone else have any guest room re-do's, or a slightly obsessive obsession with a store we might adore just as much?

Building a Modern Desk - Part 3

So, the desk is finally completed. All in all, it took us 2 full days, and about $225 to create this desk - but it's not only beautiful, it's extremely functional and incredibly tailor made to us. It spans the entire length of our wall, and has a custom built storage unit included. When we were pricing desks which weren't exactly what we were looking for, the total cost was around $400.

If you missing the beginning of the desk saga, you can find part 1 here, and part 2 here.

So, continuing on where left off, we ended Saturday night with having primed all of the boards, as well as painted them in the gloss black paint that we had picked out. Now, it was on to assembly.

First, we built the shelving unit, which is shown below - it may look weird as it has no top on it, but our desks served as the top for the unit and met right in the middle.

Second, we measured up, and then leveled out the supporting braces for the desk along the back and sides. Basically, the top of our desk is 3/4 in thick piece of wood that is supported along the back and one side by wood, and then on the other end by the shelving unit. 

To prevent bowing in the middle, there are two L brackets on each side mounted into the studs for extra security. You can see one of them here. 

We are so happy with the completed product. We immediately unpacked some of the boxes that have remained packed for weeks now, and loaded them into the desk. Below is the shot of it in it's entirety. As you can see, the middle portion is used to house Tyggy's favorite sleeping cube, so that he can be with me during the day while I work.

This is a shot of Silas's side of the desk, which as you can see is already laden down with electronics. 

Below is my side of the desk, which will generally be used as my work space, but will double as a crafting space on the weekends. 

And, in our happiness at getting everything together, Si also put together the wire shelving that I used to use to hold my crafting items, at which point, I loaded them down with all of my craft stuff. The plan is to get great fabric bins on sale, and put them all in there, but it was just great to get everything in right now.

So that's it! We have an amazing desk, and feel free to ask any questions you may have about creating it yourselves. There was a lot that we had to leave out, just based on not boring you all to death!

Building a Modern Desk - Part 2

We went out to Lowe's last night to pick out the wood. We chose hardwood, 3/4 inch thick, 4x8 feet. These things were huge, but I had looked them up online prior, and had mapped out how we needed them cut. Before I got really into doing home projects for myself, I was always really nervous about how I would get the wood cut, but Lowe's kindly does the cutting for you, for a really minimal price. We got 2 sheets of the wood, and they cut them right to size for us.

For anyone wondering, the cubes making up our storage system are all 14in x 14in, and the desk will sit 29.5 inches above the floor. Our desks are 73 inches long, with about 52 inches of that free hanging. (Well, not really, since it will be secured, but you get my drift).

We also wanted the desk to be black, so we picked up a gallon of white Valspar primer, and a quart of black gloss Valspar paint. I've always been a Valspar fan myself, based on coverage, but what paint you use is obviously up to you.

On Saturday, we got right down to business:

Silas sanded down all the rough edges of the boards with a block sander.

Then Tygg supervised me painting the boards with primer. 

Finally, at the end of the day, we painted them to the glossy black. (Note, this is not all the boards, but all we could fit in the photo).

All in all, prepping the boards, priming them, and painting them was an all day process. As you can probably tell from the last photo, it was pretty late at night, and so I apologize for unforgiving glare from our overheard lighting.

[Update - Sunday, June 12, 2011 - We finished it! Check out part 3 here!]

Building a Modern Desk - Part 1

As previously noted, our new apartment has two bedrooms, one of which I use as an office right now. We're going to turn it into a office for the both of us, as well as a guest room, because the second bedroom also has a bathroom attached to it, making it perfect for our guests to have a little privacy.

Here is the floorplan of what that room looks like now.

As you can see, there are a number of ill placed doors and windows in this room, and overall, it's not a huge room. When thinking about the function of the room, while we feel like we might have guests overnight 2-3 times per year, we have to use it as an office all of the time. So the question became, how do we create an amazing desk, that has room for all Si's computer items, as well as all my craft stuff, and still leaves room for me to function at work? 

Basically, we decide that the best way to do that was to build a desk along the left hand wall, and then basically seal off the storage closet, at the same time adding a sleeper sofa and some club chairs. The first stage of course was to figure out what it would look like before we committed. I used floorplanner.com to map out our walls and doors (all done to scale!!!), and then they also gave me the ability to add furniture (still a little clunky, but you can measure your furniture and also make it to scale). Here is our finished idea:

Basically, during the main point of the year, the desk is the focal point. But once we unleash the sleeper sofa, it becomes a functional guest room, complete with sitting area!

Each of our desks measures 73 inches long, and 24 inches wide, which is perfect for a large desk area to hold a lot of items. We'd also been discussing storage solutions, and though the wooden boxes at Target are fairly priced, we decided that if we are going to build a desk, we might as well build the storage as well. To conserve on much needed space, it's being built as part of the desk unit. A really poorly drawn image of our idea is below!

I'll update this weekend as we complete the project, but it's always helpful to have a beginning post for a project this size. We're very excited about making this happen!

[Update - Sunday, June 12, 2011 - We finished it! Check out part 2 here, and part 3 here!