New Year, New (Cleaned Up) Work Space!

Pictures via Sally Cavanaugh

I don't think I could have started the new year off with a better goal - cleanup my work space at the shop! It had been driving me crazy and I was quite frankly so embarrassed by it when customers would pop back there. In the back of my shop, I have a storage area and upstairs I have an office. Both are great work spots, but both were definitely neglected when we were getting the shop up and running. My main priority was getting the shop ready for customers, so the back area was left dark dingy, and unorganized. We cleaned everything out and here is what the space looks like empty before:

Very uninspiring and basically the opposite of my cheerful shop space. Not pictured, the dark cubes stuffed, boxes everywhere and tools from our original shop setup. It was a mess and it was stressful. Up the stairs, my office had good bones since it is an open loft to the store (aka the wallpaper makes it pretty), but it needed cleaning up and organizing. Plus, I had purchased a great desk to use and was ready to set it up.

I went back and forth on the colors I wanted to use for the storage area. At first I was thinking about doing blush pink walls. Floor wise, I was thinking I'd have to stick with a gray or some kind of neutral because of limited cement paint colors. After looking at some inspiration, my mom got the bold idea to paint my stairs pink (my mother, who loves black, suggested pink!). I loved it. I then decided to paint the walls white to let the stairs pop. I was still stuck on the floors. I had considered navy, but it wouldn't really go with the style of my store. I went into Sherwin Williams and when they said I could do the cement paint in any color, the indecisiveness set in. I left with lots of swatches and some samples of pinks. Bella Pink  won for the stairs. After staring at a bunch of boring neutrals, my mom and I painted some pink on the floor. Why not? Where else could I have a pink floor? I mean I've painted stripes on a ceiling before, I wasn't afraid of a paint risk.

I loved it! Thank goodness because I had to paint the whole area to see if it would work or not. Hard to judge a crazy floor color without covering a large area. Once the painting was finished, we had to organize the back stock, packaging materials and supplies. To keep things light, I decided to ditch the dark cubes that were back there when we took over the space and we purchased white ones from Target. Dustin added a back "bar" on the top of a row of cubes and I love it for customers to use during events and for quick storage during photo shoots of products. It is so nice have a bright, happy storage area!

Need to come up with a way to hide that big electrical box.

Photos via Sally Cavanaugh

Not perfect, but that door looks so much better white!

Now up the new pink stairs to my office! Like I mentioned before, this was more about organizing, throwing out the mountains of paper and setting up my new desk. Having a clean work space makes the office work I need to do a lot more fun and definitely less stressful! Love that the wallpaper is in my office space and I love the white Sugar Paper desk I scored from Target a while back. To accessorize my desk I pulled some of my favorite items we offer in the store: lucite ruler, gold stapler, legal pads, floral file folders, gold scissors and lucite tape dispenser.

Photos via Sally Cavanaugh

Thank you to my mom for the color inspiration and for helping me paint (not a fun task when there are so many edges!). Thank you to Lily and Olivia for all their help organizing and cleaning. Thank you to my husband for setting up my office and putting together the six cube shelves he had to go to Derby to pickup. Thank you to Sally for taking fabulous pictures for me. Lastly, thank you to my customers for letting me close the shop for a week to make all of this happen!

Lots of Love,