Office Redecoration [Part 1]

While Josh was out of town a few weeks ago, I tackled the last room (non-bathroom) in our house that needed painting, the room we affectionately call the 'man room'.  Basically it houses a little bit of junk and has functioned as an empty workout room for the last year or so. Here is it in its before state.

I painted it gray, my color of choice these days.  I figured that was versatile enough for the future and I really love the idea of having the accessories be the items that bring the color to the room instead of the walls like I've done in the past [guest room & our room].  This is a switch for me, but its been a fun challenge finding coordinating colorful things to put in this space  My thoughts are that I want to have the accessories be mostly white (following the 60, 30, 10 rule, sort of) with pops of bright green and bright orange. Here are some of the things I've found!  

Thus far we've purchased the desk, thanks IKEA.  We also got the companion drawer set (pictured below).  Others we're considering, the lamp, the hourglass, the cube bookends and the green chair are all from Crate & Barrel.  The file folder is something we probably won't end up with, from the MoMA store.  I've got the chord holders in the works from amazon.com and one thing I really want is the green wall file folder holder, but I can't for the life of me remember where I found it! (Please if you find it, comment and let me know where!) 

I love this chair! But it doesn't look super comfortable.  But if I didn't have to worry about sitting in it myself for hours at a time, I'd get it in a heartbeat.  (CB2)  We'll see what kind of chair we can agree on or if we just keep the plain black one we have. 

More to come later along with finished pictures of the new office.  Thanks for reading!

Organization: Office & Desk

A much needed post (probably part 1 of 2) on organizing your desk and office.  Since we don't have a home office, I'm mainly speaking from my work office experience, although hopefully this winter we'll be re-doing the man-room into an office!
For starters I would like to say that if you come in my office at work during the day, it is never that organized!  So I don't claim to have this all under control.  I'm mostly just a firm believer in giving everything its place, and having somewhere to put the 'random misc.' things that don't need their own place.  For example, I have tons of magazines floating around my office most of the time.  To solve that problem, or a similar one, is having a catch all basket/file/place for the 'I'll get to it later' items (like my magazines). Something like this (below) can help you keep those things all together, but it doesn't really have to be organized.  I just contains the mess.  (See it here.) 

At home I use something like this in our makeshift office (the family room!) to hold our magazines/extra paper things that lay around.  I purchased this at Target.

I've also considered pieces such as this to contain paper messes on my desk (found here and here).  They're cute, fun to look at but also serve a purpose.