From Boring Spare Room to an Epic Moody Office

I finally transformed our boring spare room into the moody office of my dreams; complete with a custom vintage art gallery wall.

Back in 2018 my husband and I completed a months-long, mostly DIY renovation on the first floor of our home. We re-configured rooms, laid new flooring, changed window layouts… it was a doozy. We hired out for the really big things like electrical, plumbing, and kitchen build but I oversaw all of the day to day work. I did a huge amount of the DIY projects as well because I was self employed. It was a really fun (very frantic) way to learn how to use power tools and problem solve on the fly with big expensive deadlines looming.

Once the big project was done we were financially, emotionally, and physically spent. Decorating kind of took a back seat for a while and its been a sloooooow process ever since. You can see a cool transformation we did here post-reno.

My office was one of the most neglected rooms of the project. Used as a staging area during the different phases of construction, it was a last minute finish before our big house re-warming party. I DIY’d board and batten on the walls and painted the trim to match – it is a moody office heaven. But its always lacked some zshuzshing. Well; I finally found the inspiration I needed and wrapped up my moody office makeover last week. I am smitten with all the style injected in to it and don’t even care that it took 4 years to complete 😅.

The Design

I’ve been self employed in some capacity since 2017. Being self employed means I need a place to work, and we are lucky enough to have space for that in our modestly sized cape. I am pretty averse to the whole white wall trend and wanted something darker to make the space feel cozy and inspiring.

I chose to add board and batten to the walls to give dimension and interest, and painted the window and baseboard trim to match. The paint color I used is SW Thunderous, which is such a chameleon color. Sometimes it looks super green and other times it almost looks grey! I love the mood ring quality it has. The top portion of the wall and the ceiling are painted SW Gray Clouds. I kind of choose paint colors on a whim… I’ll go to the store with a color in mind, but pick the final shade on the spot. For my office I chose Thunderous first and when I saw Gray Clouds… well the theme became clear. The color names were destined to be together in my office.

To create the board and batten look, I had to get creative. I was initially planning on using 1×3’s from the hardware store to achieve the style, but they were way more expensive than I budgeted for. So with some help from my husband, we figured out we could buy 1/4″ finish grade plywood sheets and rip them down using our table saw to the dimensions I needed. This obviously took more time (and math) but saved lots of money overall.

The batten ended up being 1.5″ wide, with the top trim at 3″.

The Décor

The moody office sat done but not done for the last 4ish years. It was time to wrap this baby up with a bow and get some style in the space. I keep all my houseplants in the office, so finding a nice plant stand was the first step. It turns out plant stands are similar to purses in that the bigger they are the faster they fill up.

My desk is from Ikea. I like that you can switch out leg options to suit your needs. Initially, I had 2 saw horse legs but needed more storage so I upgraded one of them to a set of drawers. I love that I can fit my printer on the base of the saw horse leg so it doesn’t eat up desktop real estate. Getting a new desk is high up on my list, but this has served me well for the last 8 years. The chair is a Facebook Marketplace find. My husband actually found a set of 6 of these ghost chairs for $150 and we immediately scooped them up!

A new addition to the office is my acrylic wall calendar. It has seriously improved my productivity since deadlines and tasks are staring at me in plain sight. I like this particular style because it came with white and black dry erase markers, and has slots at the bottom for accessory trays that they sell as well. I picked the pen holder, but they have key rings and larger catch-all trays if this was for a mud room or entry instead.

The Gallery Wall

This is definitely the pièce de résistance of the whole room! You can read how I DIY’d the prints here. I thrifted all the frames over time and painted them using a wax based paint to give uniformity. The prints all came from various Etsy shops with a general theme of vintage women. I am so so happy with how this wall turned out! Its the first thing you see in the room, and it makes such a bold statement. Sourcing the frames and prints took a few months because I wanted each piece to feel intentional to me. I removed the glass from each frame and lucked out on finding a few frames with nice mats included. Some of the mats were sun-faded, so I spray painted them matte black.

The biggest challenge for me with this gallery wall was the scale. I always end up going small with things and really wanted to push myself this time. I was able to find a matching pair of 12×18 frames at Goodwill and that really inspired me to just commit to some bigger pieces. This wall wouldn’t have been half as special if I just stayed in my comfort zone!

Sometimes slow design is the best way to do things. Taking 4 years to do it is a little overkill, but if I rushed in to decorating this space just to “finish” it, I’d probably hate it by now. Really feeling out the space and thinking things through took the final product to a whole new level.

What do you think about my moody office and gallery wall? Would you put something like this in your home? I’d love to know in the comments!

Sources:

Art – here, here, here, here, and here

Gallery wall frames – thrifted. Similar here and here

Wax Paint for frames – here and here

Desk chair – thrifted

Vases/ Planters – here and here

Plant mister – here

Throw pillow – here

Desk and desk lamp – Ikea

Wall Calendar – here

Looking For More?

I wrote about how I DIY’d the art for my gallery wall, and I have a post dedicated to the best shops on Etsy for digital download art of all kinds! Happy reading.