Over the weekend demo started in the study (deep breaths). One of the 13 projects on our 2023 project list includes adding some built-in shelves and pocket doors in the study. And there’s no turning back.

Before Demo

After Demo

Although we’ve transformed the study into a formal dining space for special occasions, we use it primarily as a home office. Literally, every day. We wanted to optimize the use of this office space by adding pocket doors for much-needed privacy and noise blocking. That, along with adding some built-in shelves and cabinets to give us some much-needed storage. I drew some inspiration from these built-in bookshelves designed by Marie Flanigan Interiors, but ours will be different to suit our needs and home!

Source: Marie Flanigan Interiors

To make all of this possible, we’re narrowing the opening from 96″ to 60″ to lend more wall space for the built-ins and give us more reasonable dimensions for pocket doors. Here’s a little sketch to give you an idea of what we’re heading towards! (I always get a bunch of questions on how I make these drawings, I drew this up in Notability on the iPad!)

I’ve had my heart set on finding some vintage wooden french doors to use, but you may have seen on Instagram that we went “vintage door shopping” at a salvage yard and didn’t have such luck. They had thousands of beautiful doors, but we were hunting for a pair of wooden doors 30″ wide and around 96″ tall. They can be a couple inches taller, but we can’t bump up the header too much without taking away from the crown moulding.

We hunted around online and a few more places in store, before I decided “I’m thinking too much about this!” Sure, occasionally the pocket doors will be closed for meetings or calls when the girls are home, but not that much. If I were going to find these amazing antique doors I think I’d want to see them a lot more. That’s when I decided it would make a lot more sense to have these pocket doors either match the existing interior doors in our home or the pantry doors.

Kitchen Sources

Yes! The pantry doors!! That would work!! I like the idea of a window in the doors even when they are closed and we already know how to get these! I really thought I wanted something unique for the pocket doors but I think it actually makes more sense to repeat an element in the house.

In the drawing above, you can see that the mural comes down between the doorway and built-ins so fortunately we were able to preserve that part of the mural and will place it back once the built-ins are in!

We’re working with a local craftsman to make the cabinetry and it will be painted the same color as the trim in the rest of the room. You know I’ve been toying with changing the color–and I know I definitely want something high gloss this time!–so it might be the time to make the switch. EEeeek I suppose it’s time for me to finally settle on a paint color in the study once and for all…