Home Tour: Office/Guest Room

When you first enter our home, to the right, you see our Living Room. Straight ahead of you is a hallway that leads to several different rooms.

We ran out of room for these book cases in our office, but they fit perfectly in this place. I pulled out all of my children's/classroom books that I had brought with me and put them on the bottom shelf. I also have my cookbooks (top far left,) coffee table books, (top left,) and "lendable" books (top right.) Technically, all of our books are "lendable," but these are ones I would highly recommend to friends who were looking for some good fiction (Francine Rivers, Terri Blackstock, and Alexander McCall Smith.)

I used the top to display a bunch of frames and knick knacks. The pictures in the frames all need updating, as alot of the pictures are from before we were married, of high school friends and kids I worked with. I want to put in pictures of our parents and siblings.

To the right of these book cases is the doorway into the entrance of our office/guest room.

Straight through that door is the bathroom. Not pictured, to the right of this picture is a little enclave that could hold a wardrobe (closets are not built in on this side of the world,) but we are just using it for storage of some boxes. Most of the time it is behind the open door, so you can't see it, which is nice!

I like this bathroom alot. It has an older shower curtain that was in our guest bath in our apartment in the States (from Target,) and is a pretty big bathroom. The finishings are all new and modern, but most importantly, they are "western," and no, I do not mean as in cowboys. I mean it has toilets and sinks that are styled like we would do in the States, instead of squatty potties (yep, some houses here have that,) or giant, gaudy pieces, like we had in our last house.

We have four full bathrooms and two half bathrooms in this house. I know. Ridiculous. It takes me a full day of chore time to clean them. But since the builder/owner is a local, he built it somewhat in a local style, which means that no one should have to share a bathroom.

We keep extra toothbrushes, toothpaste, and facewash downstairs in this bathroom, which makes it convenient when you need to freshen up before heading out. Because I'm just that lazy that I don't want to climb those stairs.

The office is the room that we have both been dreaming about for over three years. A month before we got married, in 2008, we were broke college graduates who wanted to buy our first "grown up" piece of furniture. So, what did we do? We went out and spent a ridiculous amount of money on a gorgeous inlaid wood desk.

We're practical like that.

My parents gifted us three tall bookcases and we used Target gift cards to buy four smaller ones, and that room, our office, was our only furnished room for the entire first year of marriage.

True story.

But what a beautiful room it was!

Our office was our sanctuary. We had all of our books displayed beautifully and a nice, peaceful place for Ian to study during his graduate school time. And I loved having a dedicated space where I blogged for my first year of marriage.

We packed it all up in the spring of 2009 and haven't seen it since then! When our crate arrived in July, our books and bookshelves were some of the first things we pulled out and organized.

It has a little different feel to it this time, as it is more of Ian's own space than a shared space, since he works from home most of the time. I used our red curtains in there to try to pull in a Georgia Bulldogs color scheme (his favorite team,) but it would still need a few more details to make it an actual theme in the room.

View from the entry of the room into the office:

The tall bookcases house all of our non fiction books. I've told Ian that we aren't buying any more shelves (except maybe for the girls' rooms) so what can fit on there is all that we can keep. I weeded out a bunch of my fiction books that I will donate to a library or give to a friend and he painfully pulled out a few of his fiction books that are not "classics."

There is still a little more room for a few books and I think there are alot of books that can be trashed/given away, because they were either 1.) no good, 2.) duplicates, or 3.) read and will never be read or looked at again. It'll take me awhile to convince Ian of this. We have a Kindle so we are trying to buy our fiction books on there, but it still isn't the same as a paper copy of a book.

View of Ian's desk and the shorter Fiction book cases:

We have our diplomas framed and displayed and Ian wants to add our certificates from our language school up there, but they aren't as official and beautiful as our college certificates so I am not sold on it yet.

And, yes, Ian doesn't have a desk chair yet. He sits on a little step stool when he works. I keep telling him to bring in one of our six dining room chairs to use until we buy him a real chair, but he doesn't do it very often.

 View of the taller book cases and the twin bed that makes this room a "guest room."

I want to add a small end table with a decorative lamp and some red throw pillows to the bed in order to make it look a little more cohesive and not so stark.

Other than that, this room is DONE! We really like tile floors so I don't think I'll add an area rug. I'm not sure that we'll always have a dedicated office room, but for now, it is beautiful and we really like having all of our books in (almost) one place!
 

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Home Tour: Office/Guest Room