DIY Gold & White Shelf and Other Little Office Updates

Welcome to the newly updated corner of my office! A shelf has joined the party and it has been a game. changer. y'all. I love it. Vertical storage is a big key to staying organized when you've got a limited amount of space. (Side note: don't we all seem to have that problem regardless of our home's size?)

I decided to go the DIY route for this shelf, which meant a lot more time with a paintbrush than I would've liked, but I couldn't find any pre-made ones that fit my measurements/specs. So off to Lowe's I went for the wood and to Ikea for the brackets. I bought the $2.00 Ekby Lerberg ones in case you're curious. I had the paint on hand already from other projects. I decided on white for the shelf and gold (!) for the brackets. Gold is definitely the accent color in the office if you hadn't noticed from other projects like the Greek key washi tape desk top trim and the mini bulletin board. It's a great unifying color for this little room.



I spent a good chunk of time off and on over the past week painting the wood with about four coats of General Finishes paint in Snow White and and two coats of their high gloss top coat. In hindsight, I probably would have saved some time by priming the boards first, but I was impatient and wanted to use what I had :).

And yes, there are two shelves in that photo above. There's only one in the office - the second is going somewhere else in the house.

The brackets got a few coats of Martha Stewart's multi-surface craft paint in gold.

After giving the shelf and brackets a few days to fully dry, I attached them to the wall. It was definitely a two person job to make sure everything was level. (Thanks, husband!) The easiest way we found to do that was to place one bracket on the wall then hold up the other bracket, place the shelf on top, and then sit a level on top of the whole thing. We moved the bracket up or down as necessary until the level's bubble was in the middle, then marked the hole on the bracket where we would place the screw. Maybe that's intuitive to y'all, but this was really my first time installing shelving, so I thought I'd pass that tip along!

Once I was sure the shelf was secure, I organized my office supplies on it, gave it a little "pretty" and called it a day. I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I keep some of my office stuff up there in those magazine files (blank charts, FedEx supplies and billing forms for my patients - not that y'all really care that much about what's in 'em!) and that big stack of paper to the right is for my printer. I go through a lot of paper each week, so I like to keep a nice stack there, and the rest in my closet. The framed photo is one of my favorites from our wedding out on the dance floor - it's nice to look up there and see that in the middle of my work day :).

Remember the trash-to-treasure metal card catalog from a month or so ago? It found a good home as an office supply organizer and a place for my printer to sit. Those drawers are perfect for surplus office supplies - I'll have to give you a tour sometime.

Three more magazine files live on the floor under the card catalog. They house other miscellaneous items like reference books, legal pads and medical journals. I wanted to give the office a really clean look since it's so small, so tucking those items away adds to that. Since the magazine files are identical, I made some fun labels for them with the contents.

The space on the wall between the top of the printer and bottom of the shelf was looking a little lonely, so I decided to try my hand at two popular trends right now to put a quick piece of art together - watercolor and hand-lettering.

This was so simple, y'all. Would you be interested in instructions for how I did it? I'm not going to go into detail in this post since it's already getting quite lengthy, but I pretty much just painted the background with a set of cheapo watercolors and then wrote the words with a bronze Sharpie. If you want more details let me know and I'll put together a little tute.

I chose a part of a favorite Bible verse (Isaiah 43:1) to hand-letter. The whole thing says:

But now thus says the Lord, he who created you , O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel; "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine." 

That's always been a really comforting verse to me, so to have it in a prominent place where I spend so much of my days is awesome.

This corner is turning out to be one of my favorites in the whole house so far. Here's one last look at the whole thing:

It's looking much better than right after we moved in a few weeks ago - that's for sure!

Thanks, as always, for following along with me as we make this little house our home!

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