Mostly done!

The study is mostly done!  The only things left to do:  stain 2 shelves, put them back up, buy and install a new light fixture, and clean the turtle tank!  Piece of cake!
 

Let's take a look back at the plan for the room:

But before I reveal the new version of our study, take a look at some before pictures of the room.  I haven't posted these before because I never took them, plus the room was always messy and unpresentable.  If I could have closed a curtain to shut it off from the rest of the house, I would have.  Not anymore, though!

Book wall

Reading corner

 Front wall

 Old Kristen

 

Granted, there is some junk in the pictures that obviously wasn't in the room at all times, but you can see how cluttered and chaotic it was.  I just haphazardly put any sunflower item I had on a shelf or tabletop, without regard to the hoarder I was becoming...plus, that's just way too many books...I love books, but do I really need 4 dictionaries and 9 Bibles?  PURGE!

First step was clearing the room and cleaning the baseboards, floors, and clearing out all those spiderwebs in the corners...I wasn't kidding when I said we never went in there.  Then, the painting had to start - I asked Dave how much I could pay him to not have to paint that room.  I just wasn't feeling it that day...Dave obliged, for the cost of just 3 bajillion dollars.  :)

I let him sleep for a few hours, but the next morning he was right back at it, putting the new shelves together.  I only heard a few cuss words, some of which were directed at me when I pulled too fast when taking the wine bar section out of a box and the drawer fell on his foot.  Ooops!

Seems like Dave's doing all the work, right?  Well, with all the heavy lifting and manual labor finished, here's where I come in.  The decorating!  Everything went back where it was before, just a little cleaner and less cluttered.  The book wall is still a book wall, but since the shelves don't have that ugly ass cardboard backing, you can see the wall behind the books and the room isn't chopped off...we purged a good number of books, and I put the ones we decided to keep back on the shelves.  I separated them as classics, fiction, history, ghost stories, photography, etc.  Our scrapbooks are on the bottom shelf, and our yearbooks made the cut, too. 

 Bonus - I had forgotten that there were stemware holders on the wine rack - so that emptied out another kitchen cabinet shelf!  

The reading corner didn't change much, except I added a white blanket and a pillow to add a touch of color to that corner.  I brought that tripod lamp in from its previous home in a bag in the garage, and it works perfectly with all the other wood tones in the room!  This corner will get spruced up a little once I stain the wall shelves that were there previously to match the room and put them back up.  I think we'll put Dave's Harry Potter books on one, and my favorite coffee table books on the other, along with our awesome 'A' letter stand from Anthropologie.

The front wall didn't change except for cleaning and new curtains, which I hung high and wide to make the window look bigger.  I knew that using red curtain panels on either side would make the window look small and block a lot of light, and since it's a single window, I hung the curtains about 8 inches outside the frame to allow as much natural light into the room as possible.

 I know the turtle doesn't fit in the design, but this room is his home

Those CD's on top of the cabinet won't fit in the drawers - working on a better solution for them...

  

There are a couple small projects I did in this room during the reno that I'll share later, along with how I unexpectedly came up with the funds to buy the light fixture, but I am so glad this room is finished!  It's one thing to plan and visualize a room, but seeing it all put together and cozy-comfy is so much better!