#remember that time I spent like 14 hours straight just painting in order to finish a wwx comic by his bday

[trans-xianxian]

I was like hell yeah I'll finish the comic tonight! but then it took me half an hour to do the hair for 4 panels, two of which barely had any hair to even paint...

[wftc141]

Voltron: Global Military Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Unit-Chapter 9: Kingfish

1300 Hours

02/13/18

Goiânia, Brazil

While the analysts continued to go through intel on Sendak's location, the Voltron Lions spent the rest of the night at a local pub for some quality time together. Lance, Hunk and Keith competed against each other in pool while Pidge watched with her glass of Coke. Hunk however stopped the entire game with a story of his life when Lance asked him.

"So you're saying you set off a fire bomb during senior high?" Lance repeated.

"Yep," Hunk answered. "My stupid ass thought it was a good idea to light a firecracker with spray paint in the bathroom. I was a firework enthusiast back then. I ended up with a three day suspension but somebody from the Army was impressed about it and recommended me to the military. So I took that offer after graduation. Got into the EOD for a couple of years before I joined the Rangers."

"That's one way to get noticed."

"So, how many bombs did you defuse while you were in the army?" Keith asked.

Hunk paused for a moment while his eyes remained fixated. Lance lifted his beer to his mouth and took a swig.

"Well...I would say 50 and during my time with the Rangers...250."

Lance suddenly spewed his drink out, spilling it onto the pool table. Other bar goers glanced at them in confusion while Keith and Pidge were equally surprised.

"250 bombs?!" Lance blurted out.

"Holy shit, dude." Keith muttered.

Hunk chuckled, scratching the back of his neck. "Yeah. While we were on tour, there was this Taliban, don't remember his name. Had a record of planting and detonating IEDs on Afghan troops, including a Blackwater patrol. He planted one next to where me and my unit were while we were on overwatch. I managed to find that bomb and disarm it. And that was not all. When me and my team evacuated from the building we were in, the guy was stupid enough to check on his IED. Once he got there...let's just say he now knows what it feels like to get blown up by his own bomb."

The team already surprised and astonished than they usually were. Lance in particular was confounded and invested for more.

"Yo, that was pure badassery," Lance said, pointing at Hunk with his beer. "You gotta tell us more while we get some more drinks."

Lance and Hunk moved away from the pool table and headed for the bar, leaving Keith and Pidge by themselves. Keith watched as Lance slapped Hunk's back, laughing his head off.

"Wish we had him in our Battalion." Pidge commented, grabbing Keith's attention.

"Yeah but you forgot our C.O was an asshole and would probably be less welcome about Hunk." Keith replied.

"If he saw what Hunk did, he'll probably piss himself and would rather hand his leadership to him."

Keith nodded, silently agreeing before looking away.

"So, how's things with Lance?" Pidge's asked.

"Hm?" Keith glanced at her who was smirking in a teasing manner, in which Keith wasn't fond of.

"You two seem to be getting along really well."

He sighed and looked away once again. "Yeah...he's alright."

"Oh my goodness. It is true! Keith Yeun has admitted that he likes Lance!"

Keith was unable to control his smile before letting a chuckle slip out of his mouth. "Stop."

They went at it for a moment before calming down. Keith then glanced at Pidge's who took a sip of her drink. There was something he wanted to ask. Tensions with NATO is potentially going to escalate if nothing's done to persuade them in withdrawing their decision to shut them down. But Keith felt like there were ulterior motives inside, besides their experiences.

"What's your opinion on NATO?" He asked.

Pidge lowered her glass, sighing. Her eyes gazed forward without a glimpse on Keith.

"We've made some mistakes but that doesn't mean Voltron should be to blame for," She answered, pushing a lock of hair behind her ear. "Either NATO's scared or they just don't trust us."

"Makes sense. Hopefully it won't come to this and they'll allow us to go after the real enemies before more casualties arise."

"Amen to that."

Suddenly, Keith felt his pocket buzz. It was another text message to report back. He got his phone out and read the message before looking at Pidge's who also received one too. They both finished their drinks and headed for the door, alongside Hunk and Lance who had just paid for their drinks. One part of Keith's mind thought that the meeting would be bad news but they'll have to see for themselves.

1320 Hours

The team arrived at the hideout where Shiro and Allura were both waiting for them with Colbert accompanying them. They took the seats allocated for them, facing the board full of intel and pinned photographs. Once they were seated, Allura began her briefing.

"We finally have confirmation on Sendak's whereabouts," Allura said. "The satellite pictures we were provided has found him at the favelas in Rio de Janeiro with his Galra forces where a local militia is assisting them."

"What is this, Modern Warfare? Are they taking it straight off the game or somethin'?" Lance asked.

"Dunno," Colbert shrugged. "That part of the slums is a haven for shady business and organizations as there's no chance you'll find a good place for cover. The locals who live there may join the fight too and eventually vanish off the surface. This militia isn't a bunch of thugs. They're trained killers. They were responsible for multiple murder counts and all that bad shit for the past ten years. It's been giving the military a headache in dealing with them, especially with the casualties they suffered."

"The BOPE were more than happy to lend support and they will be taking point to lead us to the militia's district. We'll need to be quiet on this because the militia does use locals as spotters."

"What about the situation with NATO?" Keith asked.

Everybody turned to Allura and Shiro who were silent. There was still nothing they could find or hear from as of yet.

"We're still working on that," Shiro said. "For now, our mission is bringing Sendak in."

The team began to file out of the room, leaving Shiro and Allura together.

"Hopefully Coran and his analysts know what they're doing." Shiro commented.

"I'm sure they're getting to the bottom of this," She replied. "We just need to bring in Sendak and then we'll focus on the rest."

"You're right."

Allura glanced at Shiro who looked as though he was concerned about something.

"Will you be alright?" Allura asked.

"I will," Shiro answered. "We just have to reach him before he does anything else."

1333 Hours

Coran hung up on the phone and let out a sigh. The damp, lukewarm air floated across the room with the ceiling lights barely bright. The others were already getting themselves ready for another operation that isn't NATO-approved yet a worthy risk. Coran can hear the keyboard tapping near him where Gold was.

"Sir," Gold suddenly called out. "I'm in the servers."

Turning around, he approached Gold who was fixated on the bright screen.

"You're in?" Coran asked.

"Yep, only got a short period of time before they find out who's snooping around."

"That's all the time we need."

Gold began to tap away. Coran watched the screen as he scrolled and changed tab by tab. His experience with the Intelligence Corps and Interpol did pay off after all. Gold was one of those focused and dedicated people Coran knew back in the day. Although he maintained an easy-going attitude outside of work, Gold was quite the magic when Coran first met him. Shortly, Gold stopped typing.

"Found it, sir." He said.

Coran leaned over for a closer view. The screen showed several files inside a folder involving Voltron. There was a lot of files which could contain something useful. Coran ordered him to get the files copied and Gold was already on it. He continued to tap on the keyboard, getting all the files in their drive.

"What is Codename Osiris?" Gold asked.

Coran leaned forward and looked at where the cursor was on. There was a file document titled 'Codename: Osiris'.

"That was the name of our mission in Prague…" Coran muttered before shaking his head. "I don't think it matters. Just get everything copied and we'll sort them out later."

Gold nodded while seemingly disappointed about the response. As he got on with his job, Coran couldn't help but wonder about the operation in Prague. Was there something off behind the reason for the operation?

0700 Hours

02/14/18

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The Voltron team were immediately greeted with the bright, golden sunrise from the distance as soon as they got off. Dressed in full combat gear to match with their fellow BOPE soldiers, they followed the nine-man team taking point through the cramped streets. The BOPE seemed to know more about the favela more than Voltron does, taking them through areas that aren't usually open to attacks. But the team as always, was accompanied by their recon drone hovering above them with thermal lens.

The streets were eerily quieter than usual, as described by their team leader Cardozo. The shops and houses were barred shut and the windows were pitch black. Shiro glanced around the empty pathway they were on while still keeping his guard up. He couldn't help but feel as if they were being lured into a trap. No favela would be this quiet, even for a place that is infested with armed killers. But the locals at this time would still be fast asleep. Shiro briefly glanced at Keith who was beside him sharing that unsettling feeling.

As the team moved forward into the darker area, Shiro looked up to the rooftops where the buildings cut the sun off. He could feel his heart pacing but he had to keep calm, no matter what.

"You think they would be nice to offer some breakfast? Cos' I'm a little starving." Lance whispered, tugging his shirt collar.

"Santos, focus." Shiro replied.

The team continued to walk down the path in the midst of dead silence. They felt like prey walking into the den of the predators. Something was already off. But they couldn't tell what it was. Once they reached another street, everybody's comm buzzed.

"Lions and Apex 5, you got contacts above you from both sides!" Allura warned.

By the time they heard the news, gunfire erupted from above like a supercell. Everybody was dashing for cover, even though there was not much to hide from. The team lost two BOPE soldiers to the militia. Shiro dived behind an old truck with Cardozo as bullets hailed against it while the others are scattered around the street.

"Seriously? No breakfast?" Lance joked through the gunfire.

"Not now, Lance!" Keith replied.

Shiro risked a peek through the windows to count about a handful of militants with Soviet weapons on each roof before firing back. He managed to shoot one of them trying to load an RPG, causing it to discharge and blow up the entire roof he was on alongside the militants near him. Debris began to scatter around the street and the team began to fight back. Shiro quickly changed mags as Cardozo approached him.

"My men will stay here and hold these Filhos da putas off! You go find the target!"

"Got it," Shiro nodded. "Lions, fall out on me! Apex 1 will stay and hold these guys off!"

The team began to cross the intersection and headed down the alley as the gunfire behind them continued to rumble throughout the favela. They advanced down the narrow hill while reloading their weapons.

"Zero to Black Lion, Kingfish is at the red building near the soccer field southeast."

Shiro said into his comm. "Copy, Zero. Out."

As they reached the alleyway, a loud crack from a distance erupted and Keith fell backwards. Sniper fire. Shiro and the group quickly took cover as another shot went for them, hitting a car windshield nearby.

"Keith!" Pidge's called out.

He was still clinging to his chest where he was hit, gritting his teeth to the pain. Keith was not to move so the sniper wouldn't focus on him. He could still feel the 7.62 round to his plate carrier. All he could do was cough out short, detached breaths. Shiro noticed Keith reach for his comm.

"Sn-sniper...400 yards front...sc-scope flash from the center window of the blue house."

Shiro glanced at Lance who was immediately on it. He positioned his HK416 with the sniper scope on the car he was hiding behind and scoped out for the sniper. He calculated his shot for 3 seconds before pulling the trigger. The flash from the window disappeared and he noticed the rifle fall off the window.

"He's down!" Lance called out.

The team got out of cover and quickly set up a perimeter around Keith. Shiro and Hunk kept watch while Lance and Pidge checked on Keith.

"Keith you good?" Lance asked, lending him a hand.

He didn't hesitate to grab it, although his chest still hurts. "Yep, thanks for that."

Shiro approached Keith and checked his plate carrier for the bullet wound.

"How bad is it?" He asked.

"Its okay," Keith assured, tapping the bullet area. "Only hit the plate. Nothing fatal."

Shiro nodded, relieved of his safety. Without wasting anymore time, the team continued their way to Sendak's location.

Allura tapped into Shiro's group after watching the feed of them taking cover from gunfire.

"Zero to Black Lion, status report, over."

"Black Lion to Zero, Red Lion was hit by a sniper round but the shot wasn't fatal. Heading towards the location, over." Shiro replied on comms.

"Copy Black Lion. Out."

Allura then changed channels to the BOPE team. They were still covering fire for the Voltron team.

"Zero to Apex team. Status."

"This is Apex 5-1, we're still holding position and covering for Lion team!" Cardozo said over the firefight. "We're still going to hold as much as we can, over!"

"Copy, Apex. If you're taking any casualties pull out immediately, over."

"Copy. Apex 5-1 out!"

Once the feed was cut off, Allura stepped back and sighed deeply before glancing at Colbert who was still controlling the drone.

"I hope your team completes this mission, Major." The BOPE captain said.

"I hope so too, Captain." Allura replied.

There was silence in the room other than distorted gunfire. Then, Shiro's comm buzzed.

"Zero, this is Black Lion. We have finally reached the building."

Shiro breached the door into the house. After a quick sweep with a group of militants down, Shiro advanced up the stairs with the rest following him. They stacked up behind a closed door and after a countdown, Lance stepped forward and kicked the door down and the team stormed in with weapons raised. As predicted, Sendak was inside but surprisingly, he was sitting at a table with a tea set unfazed by their intrusion.

"DON'T MOVE!" Lance yelled.

"Now, now, boys. No need for the hostility." Sendak said and stood up with both of his hands raised. "I surrender."

Shiro approached Sendak up close. He was already feeling that urge to act up and do something horrible to his face after all those years Sendak put him in. Those scenes were vivid. Shiro could immediately picture his fallen comrades' bodies and Sven… he deserved something worse. But he knew better than to let his anger take control, especially after what happened back in Al-Khor.

"Nice to see you again, Commander Shirogane." Sendak said, giving him that smirk. It was enough to drive someone mad.

"Keep your mouth shut and maybe you'll see the sunrise again." Shiro hissed.

He pulled him away from the table and cuffed his hands. Once he was fully secure, Shiro tapped into his comm.

"Black Lion to Zero," he said. "We have Kingfish. I repeat, we have Kingfish, over."

[overcaffeinated-creative]

Lumi x Fenn for the ask meme, please? ^^

OTP Question Meme

This got pretty long so it’s going under a cut. :D

1. Who is the most affectionate?

Starting out it’s Fenn but once Lumi’s fully comfortable it’s her. Imagine her like a cat in that regard. Once she’s decided someone is hers then they’re hers and she had no issues laying across them or touching or anything.

2. Big spoon/Little spoon?

Fenn’s Big Spoon and Lumi’s Little Spoon. It’s easy to keep her lekku from getting squished when she’s in front of him. Plus, Lumi enjoys being held a lot and human’s are warm in a comfortable kind of way. She’s also fond on laying on his chest so her lekku can fan out.

3. Most common argument?

Lumi’s lack of manners a few hours after waking up and how it scares the others…a lot. Also, the fact she’s prone to wiggling into his arms to take his datapad, caf, and even food sometimes. Lumi looks criminally adorable doing it but that was his biscuit and he would like to finish it himself.

4. Favorite non-sexual activity?

Flying or anything to do with starfighters really. Lumi feels the most free in Space and it’s where she best connects to the Force. Getting to share something so special to her with someone she loves with her whole heart is amazing. They also make a fantastic team working on any and everything together. It’s quality bonding to get their hands dirty and try to make something run better. Watching or playing boloball comes up. Lumi took to the sport like a duck to water. 

5. Who is most likely to carry the other?

Lumi. She’s incredibly strong and not at all shy about demonstrating it. During the Clone Wars she was basically bench pressing one of her Troopers just to prove a point to Mace during an argument. She’ll hoist Fenn up, heavy protector armor and all, if there’s a point to be made. 

6. What is their favorite feature of their partner’s?

Lumi loves how Fenn feels in the Force. Almost everything she feels is muted because it’s how she keeps Shatterpoints from overwhelming her. But, even with everything hazy and suppressed the first time she met Fenn was kind of world shaking. He glowed in the Force. He was like a storm meeting a rainbow, what flying on her own felt like for the first time, or even that freedom of breaking atmo. It was at once overwhelming and one of the most welcoming feelings ever. She’s also a fan of his fancy hair.

Fenn loves Lumi’s bravery. He doesn’t have the Force but he’s seen how it overwhelms her at times. The withdrawn nature, sunken eyes, and how utterly flat she seems. Blocking out everyone, and everything, could make her life so much easier to live. Yet, she continuously opens herself up to him or Hera or others knowing it could hurt her. Dropping her guard to let people in, especially after what’s happened to her, takes something few people possess. But, she does it time and again to help others. He’s also a fan of how utterly celestial her markings are over her lekku and body. There’s nebula that wish they could shine even a fraction of the way she does.

7. What’s the first thing that changes when they realize they have feelings for the other?

Honestly, not a lot. They develop feelings for each other long before they act on them. Fenn continues to support Lumi as a friend above all else and waits until she’s ready for them to move to the next stage. That being said, Lumi does start letting him see more of her though. He gets to see her with ears (elfin like a typical AMAB Twi'lek’s) instead of keeping them hidden or she’ll talk to him without her eyebrows painted on. He lets his guard lower around her even more. He doesn’t have to be the Leader of the Journeyman Protector’s to her. He can just be Fenn complete with his flaws and insecurities and doubts.  

8. Nicknames? & if so, how did they originate?

Lumi’s called Fenn a variety of things but tends to favor saying “Fenn” like a Ryl name. It’s been a quirk since she first met him. She’s called him “Eswok” (Ryl for Heart) a few times as well. Variations of Uj'ayl also get applied to him because, “You’re red and sticky like Uj'ayl.” Sometimes a typical “Red” in varing languages slips out.

Fenn calls her Lu'ika a lot or Umi. Cyare (Mando'a for Beloved, Loved) creeps in sometimes but not super often. Kando gets tossed around more. It’s Mando'a for “Importance, Weight” but also serves as the root word for Kandosii meaning “Indomitable, Ruthless” or Kandosii'la meaning “Stunning, Amazing.” All words the correctly apply to Lumi.

9. Who worries the most?

Hands down it’s Fenn. He knows what the Force is and tries to understand a lot of it. But, that doesn’t change how much he worries over what it seems to demand of Lumi. What kind of semi-sentient power or deity or whatever it is makes the demands of children that it makes? He’s watched Shatterpoints overwhelm Lumi to the point she’s been nearly catatonic with wide eyes seeing and following and feeling millions of paths. To hear her say, “It was worse when I was a child” concerns him. He also knows that by virtue of her possessing she will expected to walk paths he can’t follow her down.

10. Who remembers what the other one always orders at a restaurant?

Lumi because Fenn tends to favor some things over others. Plus, he has a “Standard” for food as he calls it. Meanwhile, she’s okay with eating whatever she catches, with or without cooking it.

11. Who tops?

In terms of physically on top it’s Lumi more often than not. Fenn’s typically more dominate in personality though and in control.

12. Who initiates kisses?

Both of them. They spent a long time not-together but wanting to be to not make up for lost time. Lumi kisses the corner of his mouth sometimes or gives a quick peck on the lips. Fenn aims more for forehead or top of the head kisses. They’re also both very good at upside kisses because one is behind the other and leaning over.

13. Who reaches for the other’s hand first?

Lumi. She loves the reassurance that he’s there.

14. Who kisses the hardest?

Hands down it’s Lumi. She’s got no qualms about turning a kiss into a war and happily claiming everything. Kissing her is just as likely to end with her partner backed into a wall or shoved down (or off in a few cases) furniture as it is to be tender.

15. Who wakes up first?

Fenn because he’s usually got something involve the Protector’s to do. Lumi’s job is less of a set schedule. 

16. Who wants to stay in bed just a little longer?

Lumi. She’s not a fan of this waking up or moving thing. Why would she be when she can linger a little longer and cuddle Fenn?

17. Who says I love you first?

They basically say it at the same time the first time. It happens when the Empire gets booted from Mandalore (about 13 BBY in my canon) and they just kind of collide during the post-Victory high.

18. Who leaves little notes in the other’s one lunch? (Bonus: what does it usually say?)

Fenn so he can make sure she’s eating Real Food. They’re usually little encouraging things or sometimes reminders. A few times just quick doodles to make her laugh.

19. Who tells their family/friends about their relationship first?

It was kind of a nice public announcement. Lumi gets her fighter back on the ground, is out of the cockpit having just ran a trench run on an older class of Star Destroyer being used by Saxon, and took it out. Soon as her boots are on the ground, she’s scanning the crowd for Fenn, who only recently landed himself, then bolting toward him while getting her helmet off. Then it’s both of them passionately kissing in the middle of everything. She’s basically clinging in his arms with her legs legs around his waist.

20. What do their family/friends think of their relationship?

Hera, with the grace of a 16 year old, believes it was finally freaking time it happened and says just that. Bly and Aayla second this opinion. Solus is super, super happy. Fenn’s family and friends are pretty happy too. They’re a good match and they deserve their happiness.

21. Who is more likely to start dancing with the other?

Fenn because it makes Lumi giggle and smile. She’s a surprising graceful dancer and enjoys being lifted or twirled around. 

22. Who cooks more/who is better at cooking?

They split cooking pretty evenly but overall Fenn’s the better cook. Most of what Lumi knows is Survival Cooking such as making mushrooms appealing to eat for the sixth meal in a row or how to make Mynock edible by carbon based life forms. Fenn appreciates her efforts though and assure her she makes the best rycrit stew he’s ever had, including Mal'aa’s. Watching her lose to Harshuun Bread is also adorable (not that he would ever say it) because she’s got flour everywhere and is commenting things like, “Humans just need to evolve to eat raw foods like the rest of us instead of being so squishy.”

23. Who comes up with cheesy pick up lines?

Fenn but that’s only because he’s actually capable of pick up lines. Lumi basically blanks out and has no idea how to actually flirt with another living being. She’s said better lines to her starfighter than to someone she’s dating or wanting to date.

24. Who whispers inappropriate things in the other’s ear during inappropriate times?

Totally Lumi. You know that nice home stretch of Hyperspace between you and home?. Where it’s safe and your mind wonders? Yeah, she knows that place and she’s straight up turns into into Dirty Talk Power Hour whenevery there’s a chance. Doesn’t matter if she’s the one flying it or the one waiting for the flier to get back. If there’s a chance she’s on the comm and getting Fenn primed for landing.

Fenn tries to pay her back a few times but it mostly just ends with him getting drug into a closet/empty hangar/behind this pile of crates. Because, hey, she’s a hair trigger and always wins Tooka and Mouse.

25. Who needs more assurance?

Lumi. As confident and bold as she appears Lumi’s insecure over somethings. She’s so, so worried that she’s not the leader people make her out to be or that she continuously makes the wrong choices. There’s also a lot of Survivor’s Guilt after Order 66. Sometimes, she just needs someone to hold her and let her take the burden of everything off her shoulders. Or, for them to remind her that she’s truly capable of everything she does.

26. What would be their theme song?

All of Me by John Legend

27. Who would sing to their child back to sleep?

Fenn. I imagine he’s got a soothing voice when he sings. Lumi wants to try but she’s a little self conscious about singing for other’s to hear for the first ever.

28. What do they do when they’re away from each other?

They keep each other in their thoughts. Both of them are more than capable of working apart from each other without worries. But, they do miss each other. Lumi tends to pick up little things to bring back to Fenn because she’s out of system more. They also try to send a message or two to one another just to touch base.

29. One headcanon about this OTP that breaks your heart

Fenn dies before Lumi by a couple of centuries at least. He’s human with a human lifespan that all of the advances in the world can’t overcome. Lumi mourns him for a long, long time. It was like losing her lekku or half her heart. They were a team and now she has to make those decades of joy last for centuries until they get to meet again.

30. One headcanon about this OTP that mends it

When Lumi tells Fenn she’s pregnant with Kotan he starts crying. It was one thing to talk about having children one day but it was another to have this complete surprise happen. Before it had always been “After the War” with it nagging at the back of their minds that there might not be an After the War for them. Pilots live dangerous lives that tend to end short. But, something seemingly against all odds, happened and here they are having a child. It’s exactly the perfect time but there’s not perfect time to have a child. So, they’ll make this work because nothing can stop them when they work together.

[lifeinliminality]

BC/AD

I want to tell this story. I think it is important to tell, especially in this moment—when collectively we are straining against the changes wrought by a global pandemic.

Maybe I should start by saying that sometimes stories are something you’ve been working on in your life for years. You’ve crafted and cultivated it. Nurtured and pruned it to your liking. But this story was thrust upon me. This story began in an instant and I could do nothing but see it play out, catch up to its lightning speed pace, and hold on for dear life.

This story began on January 13, 2018 at approximately 11:30pm. It began with a sleeping child on a gurney in a hospital emergency room with his worried parents and a hesitant ER doctor.

While holding my sleeping child, I was given the worst news you could imagine: “He has blasts in his blood. When a child has these blasts it points to leukemia or lymphoma. We’ll be admitting your son tonight.” Cancer. Six letters that spell something life changing.

I remember a teacher once describing the difference between B.C. and A.D. when referring to dates in a history book. When I was a child, I used to think about it as “Before Christ” and “After Death” (meaning Christ’s death). I always thought it was such a strange and monumental way to mark time. Now, it doesn’t seem so strange. Our lives are literally divided into B.C., “Before Cancer” and A.D. “After Diagnosis.” But I’m getting ahead of myself.

For all we knew, our son was a healthy and happy almost three year old. He was a younger brother and would soon become a big brother—just two months prior to this night we had discovered we were pregnant with our third child. He liked Paw Patrol and playing soccer and other sports. An old soul from birth, our middle child both impressed and challenged my husband and I with his iron-strong will.

He had gotten a cold shortly before Christmas. But unlike before, he didn’t bounce back to his normal effervescent self. He got pale, was emotional, lost his appetite and after we spent the night of January 12th up every hour with him moaning, my husband decided to take him to the pediatric urgent care. I had to go to work that afternoon. I run a community wide children’s program in Montclair, New Jersey. My husband said he’d take both boys to the urgent care if he still wasn’t better after his afternoon nap. I met them there that evening after the event, in time to hold my son down while they fished around for a vein from which to draw blood. I hate getting blood drawn. When I was a child, I’d had to be held down because my younger brother was sick and they wanted to make sure I was okay. It traumatized me. But more than having my blood drawn, I hated having to be the one holding my child down for this. Little did I know that this would become a routine part of our existence.

While I waited with our middle son for the blood results, the other two hit up Smashburger in the strip mall next door. It was dinner time now and we were anticipating a rush once we left the urgent care to get our kids fed and ready for bed. Instead, the doctor came in and asked if there was someone local who could take care of our older son while we went to the pediatric emergency room. She was very specific: take him to [redacted for privacy]; no, you cannot go home and eat dinner with your children first. And don’t Google anything. I remember how strange that comment was—mostly because I didn’t even know what I would Google. She hadn’t told us anything about the blood results, only that we needed to go immediately to the Pediatric ER and that she’d called ahead.

We called our pastor, and his wife came over to stay with my oldest until my sister could get out to us from Long Island City.

My husband and I spent the 20-minute car ride to the emergency room trying to distract our two year old with his favorite song at the time: I’m Still Standing from the movie SING! An Elton John classic. It instantly became our mantra in the days ahead.

So there we were, the ER doctor just left the room after dropping the cancer bombshell us. I instantly started weeping, as did my husband. It was completely surreal. An orderly came in to wheel us up to the fifth floor of the hospital. We gathered our things. I was on the gurney with our still sleeping boy. It was after midnight now. January 14th. I don’t think I fully processed that leukemia was cancer until I saw the sign “Pediatric Hematology/Oncology” painted over the door we entered on the fifth floor. It was a waking nightmare.

We were 23 days in the hospital after his initial diagnosis. The first few days were a whirl of tests, surgeries and a steady rotation of doctors, nurses, and specialists. There was paperwork to sign: releasing the doctors and hospital of liability if something happened to our child when he was under sedation for a port placement, spinal tap, and chemo infusions. There was a social worker, a nutritionist, and a flurry of texts from family members and friends as we slowly put the word out.

Around day seven we got another bombshell—type 1 diabetes. Yep. We got a “two-fer.” So not only were we learning all we could about acute lymphoblastic leukemia and fielding calls, texts, and emails from family, friends, and friends of friends who knew someone with leukemia, but we were learning how to take blood glucose readings through “finger sticks,” calculate insulin to carbohydrate ratios, and give manual insulin injections to our son. Our son lost 9 pounds—which on a tiny toddler body renders a child gaunt. He started to associate finger sticks and shots with eating, so naturally, he stopped wanting to eat. They had to put an NG tube in—a tube that goes up the nose, down the back of the throat and esophagus directly into the stomach, so that we could give him Pediasure if he didn’t eat. He caught a cold somewhere around week two, which meant isolating him to his hospital room. He rarely smiled, he mostly slept and cried about taking the few oral medications he had to take daily. By the time of discharge, he could barely walk. His muscles had atrophied from being in bed for so long. Our once very active child couldn’t even climb the stairs at home or get up from a sitting position without assistance.

The day after we were discharged we were right back in the outpatient clinic at the hospital wrapping up the first of five cycles of what is called Frontline Treatment. Each cycle, outside of that first month is 60 days. But it isn’t necessarily a straight 60 days through. Continuing treatment is tied to how a child’s blood counts (red and white blood cells, platelets, and immune cells) are doing. If they are too low, they won’t continue treatment. If they are dangerously low, you’ll be spending a full day in the clinic getting a blood or platelet transfusion. Some cycles require weekly visits to clinic, some daily. Some cycles had four day hospital admittances. It was a tsunami of information and so many appointments to keep track of, along with his diabetic appointments and my OB appointments. And when we weren’t at clinic we were at home. Our son could no longer be in his daycare. We had to forego his friends’ birthday parties and play dates. It took our boy 11 months to finish Frontline Treatment.

The isolation felt overpowering at times. The parts of life we had to give up, the ways we had to change our routines to protect his fragile immune system. We were in survival mode and mostly just trying to get through each day. He hit remission in May 2018. But while he had no detectable cancer cells in his blood, it didn’t mean there weren’t any—and we would have to complete three more years of treatment.

Fast forward to March 2020. Our son has been in what is called “long-term maintenance” for a little over two years (meaning 14 months more until we are off of treatment). He’s been thriving: back at school, managing his meds well, his endocrinology team has been very happy with how we’ve managed his diabetes amidst chemotherapy and steroid treatments . . .

We’d been increasingly worried about what we were hearing in the news about a novel virus: COVID-19. We pulled our middle child out of school a couple of days before the state stepped in and mandated stay in place orders. Suddenly, the whole world was navigating a BC/AD moment: Before Coronavirus/After Disease. Everyone’s lives were instantly changed; families were having to adjust their routines for a huge unknown. Gloves and masks and disinfectant: a norm in our lives for two years now, were becoming household staples.

During our son’s frontline treatment we did not have to follow recent practices to the extreme, but since the stay in place orders, so many of our friends and family have been reaching out. “So this is what this was like.” Yes. Yes, this is a lot like what we have navigated since our son was diagnosed with leukemia. It’s hard, right?

It is hard. And the collective grief that we are all processing as a result of losing jobs, daily routines, a sense of control, and even loved ones can be overwhelming at times. But always, always amidst the darkness, there is light. There is joy and gratitude that can be cultivated and expressed. There are acts of selflessness and generosity to be witnessed and to perform. This is the “brutiful” gift of a situation like this. And really, this is an opportunity to pause and take stock of what is essential to our human existence and to a life well lived.

Nobody asked for this. Nobody wants it. But we find ourselves in the midst of it anyway. What we do and how we hold space in this time is what will matter moving forward. It will be part of our story. That is all I can offer you. In these BC/AD moments, there isn’t a simple solution or even a lot of answers. But I do know this, we will make it through. Life moving forward will not be the same. It can’t be. But we will find our new normal. My hope? That the new normal will mean that we seek and cultivate community more. That we realize we have all been helped by others and that we NEED others to make it through this life. That we have more generosity and compassion for one another because we are more aware that we’ve all been through some shit. Selah.

[lolainblue]

Presque Vu   Chapter 14

   Cassie came by with a big bag of takeout after she got off work, ostensibly to be Raina's guinea pig for her presentation.  But when she asked Raina if she had heard from either of the brothers again, Raina realized that somehow she had left Cassie completely out of the loop and spent the next hour catching her up.  It felt good to get it all of her chest, to have someone to talk to.  She really needed someone to help her get her head back on straight.  

   “Telling Jared you're seeing someone else is not the same thing as telling him you're sleeping with his brother.” Cassie pointed out.  “And you know it.  That's why you're having panic attacks again if you ask me.”

   Raina groaned. “Attack.  It was just the one.  And Shannon was completely chill about the situation....”

   “... which he also doesn't know the full truth of," she scolded. "Come on Raina.  Just tell them. You've come this far.  It's going to be so much worse if they find out on their own.  They might not mind as much as you think they will.”

   Raina started clearing the takeout containers while Cassie put her feet up. “Jared is already not happy there's someone else.  He's kind of possessive I think.  Which is ridiculous because it's not like we're pretending he's not seeing anyone else.  I bet he has a whole little harem on call.”

   Cassie tucked a pillow under her heels.  “Does he? Do you know that? Did he tell you that or are you just making more assumptions?”

   “He didn't deny it,” Raina answered as she sat down next to Cassie. She and Jared were doing such a ridiculous dance around each other and she knew it.  She just didn't know how to break the cycle. “We'll figure it out, Cassie.  I mean, you're probably right, we should all sit down and have a talk but I don't think anyone is really ready for that.  At least Jared and I aren't.” She reached over and picked her tablet up off the table and opened her presentation notes.  “So are you going to  help me with this or what?”

   Cassie left just before midnight.  Raina felt drained from a day that had started off rough and seemed to stretch on forever but at least she was confident about her final tomorrow afternoon.  She checked her phone before getting ready for bed and noticed several text messages from Shannon that must have come in while she was working.  He wanted her to call, and the most recent message was only about twenty minutes old so she figured he was probably still up.  She thought about just taking a shower and going to bed, she was exhausted, but thought maybe she had enough time for a short conversation.  She dialed his number.

   “Hey Rainy Girl,” he greeted her.  He sounded sunny and happy and Raina immediately started to smile.

   “Hey Shannon, what's up?”

   “Not much now.  Rehearsed kind of late tonight, we've got the tour coming up soon but I'm just hanging back at home now.”  I guess that's what Jared was referring to when he said he was pretty busy the next few days, Raina thought.  “I was just thinking about you.  Did you say that big final thing was tomorrow?”

   “Yeah, it is.  Tomorrow afternoon.  Cassie just left a few minutes ago, as a matter of fact, she's been helping me get ready all night.”

   “I was just thinking if it goes well …. and I'm sure it will...” Shannon added hastily, “then maybe we can go out to celebrate?  I mean I'm sure your friends or classmates or someone is taking you tomorrow night but maybe this weekend?”

   Clearly, Shannon thought she had a much more active social life than she did. “No, Cassie was over here helping me tonight but she and her husband have plans tomorrow, it's her mother-in-law's birthday.  I'll probably just buy myself an extra nice bottle of wine on the way home or something.”

   There was a long pause on the line.  “Raina, I don't want to sound like an ass, but don't you have anyone else? Cassie is the only person in your life you ever mention.”

   Raina felt that lump return to her throat, the same one she had gotten when he had asked her questions before, when Jared had told her to take care of herself.  Sadly, her emotions were no more under control than they had been this morning.  “I'm very busy,” she told him, trying to make excuses.  “I don't really have time to socialize much.”

   “You've found time for me,” Shannon pointed out.  Yes, but when you get to asking too many questions I can just stick my tongue down your throat and shut you up.  “Look, I'm sorry, it's not any of my business I know. But you should have someone.  Let me take you out for a nice dinner tomorrow night to celebrate.  It can be just as friends.  I'd like it if we were friends too.”

   Raina wanted to cry in frustration.  These guys were not going to let her off the hook as easily as she thought they would.  Weren't men only supposed to be out for one thing? Maybe they were right though.   It wasn't like she thought any of this cutting herself off from other people was healthy.  It was just safe and familiar and, at least until recently, far easier.  She'd made friends with Cassie and the world hadn't come to an end.  Maybe she could make friends with Shannon too? “Okay,” she conceded, “I think that might be nice.”

   “Great!” She could hear the enthusiasm in Shannon's voice.  “It might be kind of late, we're rehearsing again tomorrow but I think Jared has this charity thing he's doing either tomorrow or the next night.  I can't remember which one but obviously if it's tomorrow we won't be rehearsing late at all.  I'll call you when I know more okay? And you call me after your final?”

   Raina realized with a sense of panic that if they were going to be together tomorrow calling to tell them her presentation was done was way too dangerous.  “Just call me once you're out of rehearsal.  I'll surprise you when you pick me up.  It will either be a celebration or consolation evening.”

   Shannon laughed.  “Okay, have it your way.  I'll see you tomorrow.”

   The presentation went outstandingly well.  The proctors were blown away, and stayed more than a half an hour after everything was supposed to be done to continue to discuss her work and ask questions about her plans for the next year.  She may have been a mess with her personal life but it was good to know that academically, professionally, she was the same superstar she always had been.  Maybe she hadn't completely lost herself after all.

   Fate cut her another break when Shannon called just as she was driving home.  Apparently whatever Jared's previous commitment was had caused them to break rehearsal exceptionally early.  She went ahead and told him how well everything had gone, she was bursting to tell someone, made plans for him to pick her up and then, after confirming he was in his car, alone, headed for his own house, she called Jared.  He wasn't able to stay on the phone with her long but gave her a hearty congratulation and promised they would do something special when they got together again.  They made plans for that coming Thursday before hanging up the phone.

   It was just a 'friends' thing, and Shannon had told her to dress casually, so Raina didn't have particularly high expectations but when he pulled up at the Chophouse Shannon had been raving about she started to wonder if even the jeans she had chosen left her overdressed.  It was dark and windowless and in need of paint and looked for all the world like it housed a seedy strip club.  Inside was better, but the red velvet seatbacks still carried a certain vibe.  With her permission, Shannon ordered for both of them.  

   What came out was a steak almost as big as Raina's head served with crispy potatoes and creamed spinach.  It was the best steak she had ever eaten in her life.  Shannon laughed at the way she tore into it after the doubtful looks she had given him from the minute they pulled into the parking lot. Once they had finished they lingered for a while, chatting over whiskey flights and cigars and a bourbon pecan pie that Raina said was easily the best thing she had ever had in her mouth. Shannon cocked an eyebrow at that statement but she had just given him a playful shove and kept on eating.  Her life had taken a mercurial turn since yesterday morning and she felt happy and relaxed for the first time in ages.

   “Hey, I know this is just supposed to be friends celebrating, but would you like to come back to my place?  I could put on a movie or something.” She asked as the waiter dropped off the check.  

   Shannon just flashed that big smile that had been melting her since their first date.  “I'm not doing anything else.”

      Raina really had intended for it to just be movies and conversation, and once they got back to her place, that was how things had started. But they had found themselves edging closer and closer on the sofa as the movie played, then Shannon had his arm around her, and by the time the credits were rolling no one was looking at the TV screen anymore.  Shannon had her stretched beneath him on the sofa, their lips locked tightly together as his tongue made long slow passes against hers.  There was no urgency to it, they were simply enjoying the feel of each other as his hands unhurriedly explored Raina's curves.  He felt warm and heavy against her, and there was a certain peacefulness to it that topped the day off perfectly.  When Raina's foot began to fall asleep Shannon sat them up, pulling her into his lap, his hands resting lightly on her thighs while she straddled him. He let his kisses trail lower, and when his stubble brushed the tender curve of her neck a giggle escaped her lips.

   “I love the way you laugh,” he told her, brushing his rough chin against her again.  As she giggled his slid his hands up to her sides and began tickling her.  She fought merrily to get away, and they ended up tumbling onto the floor, her face down on the brightly patterned throw rug and him across her as he danced those fingertips mercilessly across her exposed skin.  When they slipped under the back of her shirt he came to a sudden halt.

   “What the fuck Raina.” Shannon pushed the back of her shirt higher.  She was momentarily confused until she remembered the bites Jared had left behind.  They had ached when she brushed against them and stung when the shower hit them but she hadn't checked to see how dark they actually were, had forgotten about them completely with everything else that was going on.  Quickly she sat up and pulled her shirt back down but the damage was done.  

   Shannon looked at her, waiting for an explanation but she didn't know what to say.  He didn't look jealous.  He looked worried.  She wished now she had looked at her back in the mirror.  Just how bad was it back there?  Cautiously, Shannon reached towards her again, gently turning her and raising the shirt up.  She didn't try to stop him, there was no use hiding what he had already seen.

   “Raina those are bite marks,” he observed.  He ran his finger over one of them and she could feel how tender it was with the direct contact but she managed to avoid wincing.  That would have only made it worse. “Do you know how deep these are?”

   Feeling like Shannon had seen enough, she pulled her shirt back down.  He just yanked it up again, this time without the gentleness.  “This is too much.  You need to stop seeing this guy.”

   Raina sighed.  “It's not like that. It's not like he forced me into anything.” She pulled her shirt down again and spun around before Shannon could go in for yet another look.  The angry expression on his face made her wonder just how much he knew about his brother's proclivities.  Maybe he only disapproved because it was her?

   “I'm not saying he did.  But there are a couple of places back there where it looks like he broke the skin.  That's not playing.”

   No, it hadn't been playing.  Jared had been doing exactly what she thought he was doing at the time – marking his territory.  He wanted to be sure that her other lover saw it.  Well, mission accomplished Jared.  She tried to minimize.  “I'm not sure how it looks but really, it wasn't that rough at the time.  I guess I just mark up easily.”

   Shannon got up and pulled her to her feet before leading her into her bedroom.  He stood her in front of the mirror on her closet door, turned her around and lifted her shirt up again.  What Raina saw made her jaw drop.  No wonder Shannon was angry.

   Both sides of her spine were lined in round bruises, the lower ones where Jared hadn't been able to dig in as well from the position they were in were just regular bluish-purple marks.  But they got progressively darker as they got higher.  The real problem was the one right behind her right shoulder blade.  It was about three times the size of the others and an ugly black color.  You could still clearly the outline of Jared's teeth where he had bit the spot repeatedly.  How it wasn't more painful was beyond her.  Had he known he was doing this much damage at the time? Had he been waiting for a safe word that never came? How the hell did it get this wildly out of hand?

   “Tell me again how rough he wasn't,” Shannon said, his eyes dark and angry as they both stared into the mirror. Raina let her shirt fall back down a final time and turned away.  

   “I don't know what to say.  It wasn't like that.  At least it didn't feel like that...” She suddenly wasn't so sure though,

   Shannon wasn't having any of her deflection. “You need to stop seeing him. You're lonely.  He's taking advantage of you.”

   What the hell? “Okay, you need to stop right there.  You don't know anything about that relationship and you're making assumptions. Wrong ones.  It isn't like that with us at all.”

   Shannon folded his arms.  “Well I'm only working with what is in front of me Raina but I see someone who cares so little about your safety that he left marks so deep I'm wondering if we don't need to take you to the doctor.”

   “Now you're exaggerating," she told him in frustration, but his words had instilled a little doubt in her.  Jared had been very careful to be sure that he had her permission before they had done anything rough, he had checked on her comfort levels as they went along, she had never once felt like she was being used or victimized.  She had been quite sure at the time that if she had asked him to stop he would have done so immediately.  But she hadn't tested that theory, hadn't so much as made the tiniest protest of his treatment.  Was he really looking out for her if he could leave that kind of damage?

   She thought of the way he had tucked her in before leaving that first night, the dorky way he had texted her from Australia, the way he had worried about her when he found her on the sofa, the way he had gone shopping and made sure she had decent food to eat.  Sure, he was a little controlling, but she liked that.  He was also caring, and had been kind and patient with her even when she had been difficult.  He would probably be as surprised as she was with the severity of that bruise, she imagined. And then she was angry at Shannon for making her doubt him.

   “I think it might be a good idea if you went home now,” she said, turning away from him.  

   “You're kidding me.  He does that to you and I'm the problem?” When she didn't respond he laid one large hand gently on her shoulder.  “I'm just trying to look out for you.”

   “I know." She did.  She got that.  But this was a lot to sort through and she was no longer in the mood for their makeout session. "Maybe I just have some things to think about.”

   Shannon sighed.  “That I can agree with.” He stepped around in front of her and wrapped her in a ferocious hug.  “Don't pull away on me. You can talk to me about anything.  I meant what I said about being friends.”  He gave her a light kiss on the cheek.  “I'll let myself out.”

@msroxyblog  @nikkitasevoli  @maliciousalishious  @meghan12151977 @snewsome756 @fyeahproudglambert

[crystalsoul16]

Answer all the questions, mwahaha >u

Get to Know Me

Oh geez

okay, challenge accepted, let’s do this!!

I’m putting this under a cut for length tho lol

1. What is you middle name?My middle name is Ryan c:

2. How old are you?I am 24, but definitely don’t feel like I am >->

3. When is your birthday?July 11th! Best way to remember is that it’s also free slurpee day at 7-Eleven lol

4. What is your zodiac sign?Cancer

5. What is your favorite color?various shades of blues and greens. Hard to pick just one ^^;

6. What’s your lucky number?16~

7. Do you have any pets?I have three dogs (two beagles at my mom’s, one undetermined breed (assumed belgian malinois?) at my dad’s), and three birds

8. Where are you from?I live in the state of Virginia, USA

9. How tall are you?5′2″, making me the shortest person in my family T^T

10. What shoe size are you?Depends on the brand, since I have 6 ½ boots that fit just fine, but also have a pair that’s a size 9. So it’s kinda hard to say ^^;;;

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?I have 8 pairs of shoes, but really only wear one ^^; I got a new pair of shoes for Christmas that I want to use tho!

12. What was your last dream about?…..crap, I don’t remember

13. What talents do you have?I feel like my drawing skills are pretty good, and one of my instructors at school told me I’m good at video editing. I really wanna play with that skillset more and get back into making AMVs one day, and of course continue improving my art skills

14. Are you psychic in any way?If I am, I’m not aware -shrugs-

15. Favorite song?oh gosh, I have so many it’s hard to pick one… At this current moment in time though, the one that is standing out in my mind is Strike Back by BACK-ON, which is the 16th opening for Fairy Tail

16. Favorite movie?Again it’s hard to pick one, but Brother Bear is jumping at me, so I’ll go with that for now lol

17. Who would be your ideal partner?Okay, um… Well, they definitely need to like animals, cuz I do not trust people who don’t like or respect animals. They also need to like video games. Considering I spend a lot of my time playing them, and really hope to one day be involved in video game production and/or design, I feel like my partner should also have an appreciation for video games. Plus ideal casual date is cuddling on the couch and playing games together, so a shared love of gaming kinda feels like a must ^^; Plus with online games we can still hang out even if we’re not together so yeah. Video games. Also liking anime would be great, since I love watching anime and going to cons and cosplaying (oh shit couple cosplaying tho yes plz~!!) so sharing an interest there would be great! Plus then if we’re not in the mood to game, we can just cuddle and watch anime. Also having a genuine kind and caring soul is a must. Those are probably the most important points, but I guess it’d be nice if they’re also in touch with their youthful side. I can be a wee bit childish at times myself, so I just wanna make sure I ain’t gonna be judged if I decide I want to eat dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets or cuddle with a plushie lolol Also, not a requirement, but willing to do stuff in the kitchen together would be nice~ And not judging me for watching cooking competition shows every so often would also be nice >->

……..or honestly, just be Yoosung >->;;;;;;;;;;; cuz it’s honestly startling to me how fuckin’ close that guy is to an ideal for me. And by close, I mean he is -hides face in hands- but of course, he’s fictional. So once again, fictional characters setting the bar high… -facepalms and sighs heavily-

18. Do you want children?At this current point in time, no. I’m still too much of a child in my own eyes to consider being a parent to anything that isn’t covered in fur or feathers. Maybe someday in the future, I will. 

19. Do you want a church wedding?Not sure, honestly. It would also depend on what my partner wants. All I know is that a fantasy theme would be rad!!

20. Are you religious?Not entirely. I mean, I do believe that there is some sort of higher power, but I don’t really do much beyond that. I know there’s a term for it, but I can’t remember what it is right now

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?Once, when I was little. I think I was five? I think I blacked out though so I don’t remember much about it. Otherwise, I’ve only been to visit someone or sit in the waiting room while waiting for someone who was admitted.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?Not yet, and I hope to keep it that way!!!

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?Do anime voice actors count? Cuz I’ve met a few at cons before, but I’m not sure if those count ^^;;;

24. Baths or showers?Personally I prefer showers

25. What color socks are you wearing?White

26. Have you ever been famous?Nope, and I’m totally fine with that. Too much attention makes me nervous lol

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?As said before, I’m good without that sort of attention.

28. What type of music do you like?I tend to listen to rock music a lot, but I’m open to listening a lot of stuff. Especially video game OSTs and Fantasy/Celtic stuff!

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?No I haven’t, and I think I’m too shy and don’t like my body enough to ever be comfy doing that ^^;;;;;;;

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?Three

31. What position do you usually sleep in?I’m usually on my side or stomach, and I’m pretty much always hugging a pillow or plushie when I fall asleep

32. How big is your house?Well, my mom’s house is bigger than my dad’s. That said, neither are very large really… My mom and I keep saying how we wish this house had more closet and storage space… And at my dad’s, my room isn’t even attached to the house lol. My brother took my old room, so I now have the small mini-house thing right next to the pool. It’s got a bathroom, a counter for a microwave by the door, and a small bedroom. I like the privacy it has though!

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?Sadly, I often skip breakfast because I rarely wake up before noon lol. When I do have breakfast though, it’s either a bowl of cereal or a bagel with cream cheese

34. Have you ever fired a gun?No I have not

35. Have you ever tried archery?No, but I want to so baaaaaaaaaaaad~!!

36. Favorite clean word?solely because of my bro saying it in a ridiculous voice, biscuit

37. Favorite swear word?Fuck, because it’s the one I use the most lol

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?Over 48 hours. I had three final projects due, two of which I had to paint, so I stated up two days straight to finish them, and didn’t even fall asleep before going to school. That said, I don’t remember how late I stayed up including class, but due to class time, it was probably another five or seven hours… And it was misery. 0/10, would never recommend

39. Do you have any scars?I do have a small one next to my left eye from when I got bit by a dog when I was five, which was the cause of the hospital visit mentioned a while back

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?umm……not that I recall, no

41. Are you a good liar?It depends. Sometimes I can be, but sometimes it’s easy to catch me. That said, I don’t like doing it

42. Are you a good judge of character?Not sure, honestly -shrugs- I like to assume I am, tho

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?I can try, but they probably sound horrible XD

44. Do you have a strong accent?I was once told that I had a southern accent, but I’m not exactly sure. Sometimes I may slip into an exaggerated one, tho

45. What is your favorite accent?I’m a fan of a lot of accents, but I’ve always had a weakness for Australian! Probably because I grew up watching Steve Irwin all the time so I developed an early fondness for it lol

46. What is your personality type?INFP

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?I’m not sure, to be honest. I tend to be satisfied with “cheap” clothes, like at walmart or somethin’, so I’m not sure…. If I had to guess…it’s probably my Organization XIII coat

48. Can you curl your tongue?yurp

49. Are you an innie or an outie?Innie

50. Left or right handed?Rightie

51. Are you scared of spiders?Hell yes >~unless they’re spiders in pokemon, which always tend to be my favorite bug types for some reason lolol

52. Favorite food?shit, I dunno, I like a lot of foods….. I’ll just say pasta and be general about it lol

53. Favorite foreign food?dude I fuckin’ love me some mochi~

54. Are you a clean or messy person?Very clean when it comes to organizing files. Very messy otherwise

55. Most used phrased?Lately for some reason I’ve been saying “Oh dear” a lot and I have no idea why XD

56. Most used word?probably fuck

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?On average, to get ready in the morning takes me about half an hour, and most of that time is spent waking up =_=

58. Do you have much of an ego?I have no ego whatsoever. I could honestly use more of one, even just a small one to give myself at least a little confidence lol

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?I try to just suck, but I tend to bite :/

60. Do you talk to yourself?always

61. Do you sing to yourself?sometimes, if no one is around to hear me >->

62. Are you a good singer?not at all lol

63. Biggest Fear?honestly, being disliked. I know I shouldn’t worry about what people think of me, but I do worry about people close to me finding me annoying or coming to dislike me for some reason.

64. Are you a gossip?nope

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?Either Gran Torino or Forrest Gump

66. Do you like long or short hair?On myself? I used to always keep my hair very long, and just recently decided to try shorter hair. And I actually really like it on myself! In general though, I’m good with anything~ You do you~

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?yup. I don’t feel like listing them all, if that’s what you’re asking, but I do know that one song that lists them in alphabetical order, so yup

68. Favorite school subject?hmmm…. In school, I tended to like math best, since I was pretty good at it

69. Extrovert or Introvert?I am without a doubt an Introvert

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?nope

71. What makes you nervous?everything. My anxiety has me in a nearly constant state of nervousness lol But especially being in social situations that involve talking to strangers!!

72. Are you scared of the dark?hmmm….. I mean, I can sleep in the dark if needed, but I prefer having some sort of background noise, usually a TV

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?Depends on the mistake. If it’s a typo, then no. If it’s a pokemon type advantage or something like that, hell yes.

74. Are you ticklish?uhhhh;;;;;;;; yeah, I am, but I highly recommend against it, cuz I have kicked people in response before out of reflex >-> that and I’d just rather not be tickled plz >->;;;;;;

75. Have you ever started a rumor?nope

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?no, and I don’t want to be! I’d rather be a follower than a leader!!

77. Have you ever drank underage?nuh-uh

78. Have you ever done drugs?no

79. Who was your first real crush?umm………I cannot remember, honestly…

80. How many piercings do you have?none

81. Can you roll your Rs?no, but I tried so hard to before… and my family rubbed it in that they could and I can’t so fuck :c

82. How fast can you type?I just took a quick test and averaged at about 40 WPM. Not sure how fast that is lol

83. How fast can you run?not very

84. What color is your hair?Naturally dark brown, but I like coloring the ends! So far I’ve done green and a sort of minty aqua, and I’m thinking of doing a light violet next, but I’m not sure yet

85. What color is your eyes?Hazel

86. What are you allergic to?nothing that I’m aware of

87. Do you keep a journal?nope

88. What do your parents do?My mom is a middle school teacher, and my dad does some sort of IT work

89. Do you like your age?well, I have no qualms with being 24. I just don’t feel like I am is all, lol

90. What makes you angry?Cruelty and unfairness

91. Do you like your own name?Yup~

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?I did at one point, but I’ve forgotten them by now lol I’ll give it more serious thought if the time comes around

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?I honestly have no preference

94. What are you strengths?I tend to be open-minded and empathetic, so I can understand others pretty well

95. What are your weaknesses?My anxiety and low self-esteem are not helpful lol

96. How did you get your name?……I honestly don’t know. I think my parents just liked the name lol

97. Were your ancestors royalty?not that I’m aware of

98. Do you have any scars?wasn’t this asked before…? -scrolls up- ….yup, number 39. Oh well, I’ll copy and paste it~ I do have a small one next to my left eye from when I got bit by a dog when I was five, which was the cause of the hospital visit mentioned a while back

99. Color of your bedspread?My sheets have a black and white pattern on the front, and a solid light green on the other side. Same for the pillows. The other sheets are white with a grey pattern

100. Color of your room? My walls are a beige color, and I have a hardwood floor

[truereviewpage]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 published first on https://aireloomreview.tumblr.com/

[endlessarchite]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 published first on https://bakerskitchenslimited.tumblr.com/

[interiorstarweb]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 published first on https://novaformmattressreview.tumblr.com/

[additionallysad]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 https://ift.tt/2o2zUPq

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

[yesterdaysdreams]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

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[lukerhill]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

[billydmacklin]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 published first on https://carpetgurus.tumblr.com/

[statusreview]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 published first on https://ssmattress.tumblr.com/

[vincentbnaughton]

Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any ���before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

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Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201

I know, I know – the idea of adding a little DIY office area at a vacation home seems borderline ridiculous, but back when we were debating what to add to the other side of the pantry, a bunch of people said a little desk area for email or writing or reading quietly would be nice to have in a rental. We definitely considered it, but went with more cabinets for general storage in there (you can see it here). But we kept the idea of adding a little desk nook somewhere else in the back of our mind.

And if you get our email newsletter, you already know that we ended up opting to add a desk and some extra shelving to the small little upstairs front room – which also has room for a Pack & Play. It’s a small room, but man it’s packed with function. So we’re here to share exactly how easy the whole adding-a-desk-and-shelves thing was. Literally anyone can turn some unused wall space into a functional workspace that looks polished and built-in. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot or require a lot of complicated tools or building methods.

The room we’re talking about sits near the top of the stairs at the beach house and since it’s only about the size of a queen mattress itself, it never would have worked as a proper bedroom. I don’t really have any “before” photos of the room, but here’s the view into it when we first bought the house in fall of 2016:

Below is the current view of it. We still can’t get over what a difference the refinished floors made (yes, the floors below are the same floors as the ones above – we just sanded them down and clear sealed them). It also probably helps that the walls and ceiling are no longer crumbling.

We’ve considered a ton of options for that room, including making it into a little reading/game nook or a spot to stash a Pack & Play for a sleeping baby (Sherry’s original votes) or a super practical storage closet (my vote) but until recently it had sort of just been a holding room for junk. But when Sherry’s brother visited in July, it finally proved that it was the perfect small sleeping space for a baby in a Pack & Play (the room darkening blinds definitely helped, along with having just the right amount of floor space).

We just move the chair and side table into the front bedroom and plop in a Pack & Play. You can read more about that in this past newsletter (and see a picture of it all set up in there).

Putting the Pack & Play in there temporarily also made us realize we would still have PLENTY OF SPACE on the inside wall for storage (again, my vote) AND a little desk so we’d no longer have to plop our laptop in the middle of the dining table. And the best part is that it only cost us $201. Here’s how we did it:

Materials & Budget

Two 1″ x 18″ x 72″ planks of pine shelving – $40 (these are showing as $25 each online, but ours were $19 in store)

Two 1″ x 12″ X 72″ common boards – $30

One 1″ x 2″ x 72″ select pine board – $4

Two 16″ heavy duty white shelf brackets & screws– $19

Six decorative 12″ iron shelf brackets – $108

Wall anchors (if needed)

Wood stain, conditioner, and sealer – they’d be $24 but we already had ’em from the bunk beds

TOTAL SPENT: $201 (or $225 to buy everything)

You may notice that the decorative iron brackets were more than half of our budget, so if you’re looking to do this for less – that’s a great place to save money. We chose these for consistency since we have them in our laundry room and love them, but these similar ones would save you about $30. And these slightly smaller ones would save you $45.

Making The Desk

The desk is actually hung on some basic heavy duty white brackets that we picked up in Home Depot. They aren’t intended to be a decorative element (we wanted them to visually disappear) so we mostly just chose them since they’d give us a nice deep desk space while being strong and easy to install. The 16″ depth was perfect for the 18″ shelving boards that we found to use for the desktop (actual width = 17.25″ because wood is never the size it says it is – seriously, a 2 x 4″ board is only 3.5″ wide!).

I used my stud finder to make sure I could go directly into the studs for the strongest hold. Because of that, they’re not exactly equidistant from the side walls, but they’re only a few inches off, and in a room this small you’ll never be standing straight on or far back enough to notice. You could use anchors though if bracket placement was more important for your project.

I hung them so the top of the bracket was 29″ from the floor, making the final desktop a hair over 30″ – which is pretty standard for most desks. Then, after cutting each of my boards to the right length, I laid them both on top of the brackets.

I used two pieces so that the desk would appear thicker than just 3/4″ – which is the actual thickness of each piece of shelving. Once everything was stained (which I’ll get to in a minute) I screwed the boards together from the bottom and then secured them to the brackets. And to cover the seam along the front edge, I nailed in a 1 x 2″ piece of pine that we stained to match.

It blends PERFECTLY with the rest of the top because the shelving already appears to be made of several smaller planks. So it gives the whole desk a really finished look (and makes it a smidge wider too – bonus!). My only tip is to sand the outside edges of this face piece before you stain it. The rounded edge will be much nicer on your wrists and forearms as you type… like I’m doing right now for this post.

Hanging The Shelves

The reason for the shelving above the desk area was to inject that added storage element we wanted. We still have random junk around (extra bed sheets and towels, repair stuff like spackle and caulk, a few faucets we’re storing for the duplex, and instruction manuals/warranties for all the beach house appliances, etc) that we wanted a spot for. So we ordered more of the same iron shelf brackets that you may remember from our laundry room makeover (more on that room update here).

We hung the first shelf 26″ above the desk, which was somewhat arbitrary. It looked good and felt high enough that we wouldn’t knock our faces into it when we stood up. To secure it, I once again located the studs – one in the exact middle of the room (thank goodness!) and two at the outer edge. Then I used my laser level to mark level across the three locations.

When hanging brackets like these, don’t forget to also level the bracket itself. Even on things like a robe hook in the bathroom, if you don’t take the time to level the spots where your screws enter the wall, you could end up with a twisted looking piece of hardware in the end.

The Etsy seller that we bought the brackets from included the screws, which is super helpful. You’ll need a ratchet or hex screw head to attach them, but they’re super sturdy. Just don’t forget to make pilot holes first, which will help ensure that your screws go into the exact right spot.

Then we repeated the process for the second shelf, which we placed 18″ above the first one. That’s a fairly standard distance for shelves when you plan to put large baskets, boxes, or decorative objects on them. However if you’re just putting things like small paperback books or games, you might want to go with 12-14″ spacing.

Another thing we love about these brackets is that the wood shelves just rest in them – no permanent attachment or anything. So this is where we were after a couple hours of work (and where some of you saw things in our email newsletter).

Staining The Shelves

I know we’ve probably talked about staining a billion times, but I want to point out a couple of quick things. One: we highly recommend that you use some sort of pre-stain or wood conditioner before you apply stain. You can get enough for a project like this for around $4, it’s fast and easy to apply, and it helps bring out the wood grain in your stain job while discouraging blotchiness or an uneven finish. You can see the difference between conditioned wood (left) and raw wood in the photo below.

To apply it you just liberally brush it on with a paintbrush or rag, let it soak in for about 10 minutes, and then wipe off any excess with a paper towel or rag. Then you can go right on to staining.

The other thing we did in this project was mimic the color treatment we did to the wood railings in our beach house’s bunk beds. We spent a lot of time during that project testing stain samples to get as close of a match to the pine floor as possible and, since these shelves would also be in a room with the same old pine floors, we wanted them to look similar as well.

Turns out the magic formula is a base coat of Minwax’s Puritan Pine, followed by a light coat of Minwax’s Colonial Maple. That second coat adds an extra hint of red that mimics the old heart pine floors.

The photo above is from before I wiped off the excess Colonial Maple, but you can see a clear difference that the second stain color makes. Once everything was dry, we also did a few coats of protective sealer on everything before rehanging them on the brackets.

Storage & Finishing Touches

Once everything was done, Sherry was excited to load up the shelves and I was excited to see just how much use we could get out of this small space. As you can see in the photo above, it’s kind of a mix of pretty and practical. For example there’s a perfect nook under the desk to stash our suitcases once we’ve unloaded our clothes into dressers for our stay (which isn’t exactly beautiful but it’s amazingly practical not to have them sitting in the bedrooms getting trampled).

Almost all of the decorative items that you see (that vase with some fake greenery from Michael’s, the gold frame, the faux succulent, that painting Sherry got from craigslist for $7 a while back, the three woven baskets from Target last year) are things we already had on hand, but she did grab a few new items to add a little more organization/function. Namely the clock, the magazine files (which we filled with all of our appliance manuals and warrantee sheets), and the desk lamp.

Although our favorite item might be the brass crab that a reader sent us after she spotted it for super cheap in a thrift store and felt like it had to live at the beach house. And now it does! I just have to keep an eye on it because I think the kids might try to steal it and raise it as their own at some point. The claws move and the top flips open for the most minuscule amount of storage (ink well? paperclip holder? ring storage?).

Oh and the desk chair in the photo above is one that we used to have at our beach house dining table before we got the benches – so we had that on hand too (it’s this one in “gray”). And the armchair below is an old thrift store find that Sherry purchased years ago with a new blue cushion for added comfort.

All in all, we’re super pumped about having pulled this little functional nook out of nowhere in just a few hours of work. And despite having some varying opinions and debates about this room’s use for MONTHS, we’re both glad that we landed on the perfect mix of our preferences. I get storage. Sherry gets a chair to read in AND a Pack & Play stash spot. And we both get a bonus little office area to sit down and type up posts like this one.

Although Burger may secretly be the most excited about it. I’m sure he’ll tell you all about it when he wakes up from his nap.

P.S. If you want to get access to project ideas, behind the scenes happenings, and other DIY stuff that’s going on in our world BEFORE it hits the blog, just sign up for our free email newsletter. And thanks to everyone who has already subscribed – Sherry loves writing them up and hitting send. 

*This post contains affiliate links*

The post Making A Built-In Office Nook For $201 appeared first on Young House Love.

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