HGTV: HORNE & Garden Television!!

Last week, Jay suggested to me that he’d really like to have a little space of his own somewhere in the house to work, other than this:

img_9840

It seems that despite the cute and cuddly company, such a workspace isn’t as conducive to high productivity!

We considered various options around the house, none of which were ideal: use an entire bedroom (but it’d be hard to stuff three boys and all their gear into one of our rooms); find a convenient closet to settle him into (he wasn’t keen on this one); convert a formal area to office space (we are using our front two formals right now to home school).  If we had a basement, that might be a neat solution (not only for a home office, but for about a thousand other purposes that immediately spring to mind!); alas, there are no basements in Dallas!!

So…the only viable solution at this time seemed to be the little vanity area (better known under my watch as the “junk-gathering” area)  in our master bedroom. It’s a decent-sized if not gigantic space for this purpose (5 by 5 feet), but since it also serves as the walk-through to get to my closet and one of the entrances to our master bath, we’ll be limited in how we set it up.

I have only a very blurry shot of the space, taken the first day we ever visited the house, so it’s pretty rough-looking (read “ugly”!!). But you at least see the area: a little nook off to one corner of our room.

img_7030

This angle looks directly into the nook, and gives you a view of the closet doors ahead of you, and the bathroom entrance to your right.

img_7029

Earlier this week, Jay set about gathering supplies and demolishing the built-in vanity that took up a major portion of this area. Since the cabinets appear to have been built into the walls piece by piece, the process of removing them was not simple.  Here we are in various stages of demo:

hf100_2283

See how happy it makes my husband to tear something apart!

hf100_2288

Pulling those stubborn cabinets out resulted in a few gashes in the walls:

hf100_2292

Prepping the hole for the new piece of drywall:

hf100_2298

Taping up and nailing in new drywall:

hf100_2302

Wall mudded and ready for sanding and texture…to be completed another day.

hf100_2308

Here is Jay taking a break from his work (and nursing an injury he sustained in the demolition when he took a crow bar to the ribs – self-inflicted but still quite painful.).

hf100_2312

Next steps after finishing out the wall texture and repainting are: We’ll need to install a light where there is now a blue hole (very top of the picture) to which electrical has already been pulled. And Jay is planning to custom build a desk: which will likely consist of an appropriately-sized shelf on brackets set at a height to serve as a workspace of sorts.  While he’ll be limited by the size of the space, we think he can build something that will give him room to spread out and work in addition to his nifty little Target computer cart (which he’ll keep using in his new set-up).

My hope is that when the project is all done, that the computer cart and desktop might be low profile enough to be gracefully hidden behind a curtain or set of panels which I’d love to mount at the outside of the “office nook”.

If anyone who is reading this has design input, please chime in, and tell us your thoughts. Especially if you have ever put together a little spot like this, yourself. If you have opinions to share on the curtain idea, I’d love to hear those too!!

We’ll hopefully update you soon with progress on our latest little Horne Improvement project!

4 Replies to “HGTV: HORNE & Garden Television!!”

  1. HEY!!! I’m impressed! Nice work, Jay.

    Trish, the funny thing was that at first I thought you cleared out your entire bedroom to take those pics for the post, and I thought, “THAT’S dedication to the blogging world!”
    😉

  2. That reminds me of the little office we made for Keith in our cedar closet. Still get a good chuckle out of that. I’ll look forward to seeing your finished project.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *