Homearama Office & Dining Room: a house log

During last week’s update about our Homearama Showhouse for Habitat For Humanity, we included a few peeks at how some of the rooms were shaping up.

Well, shaping up in our heads, technically, since we are still about three weeks out from being able to put any furnishings into the house (the walls are getting painted as I type this, and then the cabinetry will go in and the hardwood floors will be stained on site), so everything has been in shopping list and mood board form so far.

But in the last week the builder and his excellent team have been humming along, and we have made some truly good furniture-and-accessory planning progress in several of the rooms. Sufficient that we can at last share a few room plans with you folks that are no longer missing major elements. Some spaces are certainly further along in the planning process than others, and the two in the lead are: the study (aka: the home office) and the dining room.

They are the first two rooms in the house when you walk in, so we are grateful that they are shaping up to be a good representation of the feeling that we want this house to have. One kinda skews light & glad while the other brings in a bit more of a cozy & moody feeling that we also truly like. So we figure that together they’ll assist set the tone for the rest of the house.

Let us start with the study, er, office as we keep calling it. Here is what it is looking like now.

Since we are sort of designing for a hypothetical future version of our family (hence the tween girl & young boy rooms that we mentioned last week), we thought it’d be lively to do a home office for a woman who works (perhaps blogs?) at home. Not only is it an straightforward mental leap to make, but we also thought it would differentiate it from all of the manly mahogany studies that we are used to seeing in model homes. So light, cheery, and a smidge feminine was our goal.

1. The walls are already Benjamin Moore Simply White like the trim, but the painters still have to put our bold accent color on the 10′ ceiling, which we thought was tall sufficient to handle a rich and saturated turquoise color called Skydive.
2. This Wire Globe Lantern in rust from our lighting collection (donated by Shades of Light) will hang over the desk that will float in the middle of the room.
3. Floor length curtains in a textured & modern feeling fabric (Dapp woven fabric in Elephant) will hang floor to ceiling on either side of the window (our go-to local fabric shop, U-Fab, is donating them to the cause).
4. West Elm is also excited to assist Habitat, so they offered up this striped Saddle Office Chair but we hear it is on back order (fingers crossed it comes through in time).
5. We’d enjoy to add some chic storage boxes, like these from Target.
6. While we are at it, a cheery mug for pencils and other desk stuff could be lively. Perhaps this one?
7. This wood & metal desk hails from Green Front Furniture (sorry, we do not know the maker) who is loaning furniture to all seven of the homes in the show (more on that here). Please forgive the wonky photoshopped top (I attempted to remove some display materials that were in our shot).
8. We enjoy this art from Assist Ink, where $1 of every $5 spent goes to a charity of your selection. We are thinking this print would be ideal, since the colors fit right in, and the message is fairly strong too.
9. West Elm was also glad to donate this Torres Wood Kilim rug in Guava, which we think will keep things casual and light.
10. We are also thinking about buying this Assist Ink print as well. Feels pleasant to choose accessories with a charitable goal while decorating a house for charity.

Although most of the items above are already locked in, a lot of the accessories and art are things that we are going to purchase and fill in as the rooms get further along. So we are sure some might change as we go, and of course a ton of other stuff will end up in each room as it evolves. But on to the dining room! Last week it was looking like this (we are still waiting for our big glass pocket doors with a transom window to be installed at that extra-wide entryway).

But as of yesterday it had made some strong progress thanks to our custom wainscot being wrapped up and freshly painted! It is not your typical wainscoting, but with a quite talented carpenter at our disposal, we hoped to try something a little distinct (remember how we chatted about trying to take risks and all that good stuff here?). We thought about something like a herringbone or a chevron pattern, but did not want it to be too overt (like this) and were inspired by something a little more subtle and less common (oddly sufficient, like the pattern on these shoes that Sherry saw on Pinterest).

It is a wide-angled pattern made up of wood slats with a 1/4″ gap between them, so the lines are kind of “engraved” into the wainscot instead of sticking out. Before putting it up, we literally sat with the carpenter and drew various angles right onto the walls and used distinct board widths and spacing methods until it looked subtle sufficient not to be too crazy (but not so soft that the pattern would disappear fully when it was painted). For anyone interested, we went with 1 x 3″ boards, a spacing of one quarter of an inch between them, and the angle is around 22 degrees from the floor.

It is sort of hard to get “the full picture” for the room from that shot above (since about 99% of the other elements are missing) but once the rest of the furnishings/accessories get brought in (and the upper wall gets painted a pleasant dark color to balance out the wainscoting) we think it’ll be a strong background texture among some other elements, like:

1. The upper walls are going to be Kendall Charcoal, a deep brown-gray color that will bring some moodiness to the top of the 10′ tall room.
2. Here is the aforementioned wainscot that we brought in for reference (it’ll remain glossy white, along with the trim).
3. This is the big Industrial Modern Island Chandelier in Bronze that Shades of Light is donating for over the table.
4. We fell hard for this Jute Boucle in Platinum, which West Elm is kindly donating.
5. We’d also enjoy some potted greenery as centerpieces, like these that we found on Etsy.
6. This rustic wood pedestal table that Green Front Furniture is loaning us for the show will float in the middle of the room with the chandelier over it.
7. Among the potted plant centerpieces, we thought a collection of old wine bottles or green vases would be a pleasant mix (image from West Elm).
8. We liked the idea of dark upholstered chairs, which would pop in front of the white wainscoting. Perhaps these from World Market?
9. We will also be adding floor length curtains in this fabric (Stri fabric in Ultramarine, donated by U-Fab). We enjoy that they subtly reference the angled wainscoting, and while we hoped the room to be sort of quietly elegant, we could not resist some color on the window wall.

I do not know about you, but we are excited to be getting to this phase of the project: where things start feeling like real rooms – and we at last get to work on filling them up and making it feel like home. It is crazy to think this was simply a dirt lot a few months ago. It is also fairly crazy to think that in two short months we will have an whole wrapped up house (with over 20 distinct spaces) to share with you folks. That is a whole lotta before & after – and about 95% faster than we are used to moving. Oh yeah, and somewhere in there we will have a baby. Guess it is time to buckle up and hold on…

Psst – Wanna see the wrapped up showhouse? Click here for Our Full Showhouse Tour, which includes final pictures of every room, the floor plan, budget info, a video walk-through, and shoppable showhouse furniture & accessories.