The Wallpaper From Hell and other office gossip.

I don’t know how it works at your house, but around here if there’s an aspect of design that offends my sensibilities, I’ve been known to resort to vandalism. So, if the color of the family room offends me, I might splash a few paint samples on the wall. I’m not discreet about it - focal wall, about eye level is good. You can really move a project up the food chain that way. Don’t like the wallpaper? Start stripping it in a very conspicuous place. Oh. Bummer, honey. No way we can salvage that paper.

While the technique has worked for me in the past, I’m a little off my game. It’s unfortunate that the sick peach undertones of the wallpaper haven’t grown on me in the past year, because while I was able to get it on the Hit List, I was also assigned to get it off the wall. Let me tell you, this stuff was applied with perpetuity in mind. This is what I’ve accomplished in the past year…

There’s about a million square feet of this stuff and since chewing it off an inch at a time is not my idea of a good time, I opted for a cover up - covering as much wallpaper as possible with every photograph and piece of art we own.

Not a long term strategy, but enough of a diversion that I was able to start another project, my office, which is also unfinished. 

But the skeletons have come home to roost in the closet next to my office.

And though I can live a while longer with the wallpaper from hell in a state of suspended animation, my office situation has become untenable. It’s been waiting to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted for several months, and in that time has become a wasteland of stuff I can’t put away because, keep up! -  the room needs to be sanded, caulked, primed and painted. The skeletons have me thinking maybe I can tap into the Closet Mojo. 

Since the Closet Exposé, harmony and balance are almost as easy to find as my clothes. Could an Office Exposé - metaphorical paint swatches on a wall - bring similar results to my office space? I’m a little afraid that pictures of my office in its current state could go viral. In the design world, you don’t want to be famous for ‘Before’ photos, but if I hafta throw down to represent, I’m willing to be the lab rat of design research. 

The following images are graphic and disturbing. How does she live like that?!  How can she find anything?! That, my friends, is what I’m sayin’. 

This is the here, this is the now.

Game on. Watch this space.