In case you missed it, we’re currently tackling the girls’ office! Which, I suppose, is just a normal home office that you might find in other homes, but we have designated it for the girls’ use for virtual learning and homework, etc.

You can check out our plans and the mood board and lots of home office inspiration in this post. Our main goal is to lighten it up and add some whimsy and after last week, we’re well on our way!

Previously, the cabinets were a dark cherry with matching wainscoting around the perimeter of the room and a different tone of wood on the coffered ceiling.

We decided to paint it all Sherwin  Williams Accessible Beige, which is the color of the trim in the main areas our our house. I think a lot about how rooms flow together and because the doorway to this room is a cased opening (meaning, it’s trimmed out already) with no doors, I love the seamless transition of the color of the trim spilling out onto the cabinetry and trim work in here.

You may have spotted this, but before painting we also added vertical tongue and groove to the wall behind the desk and even carried it into the back of the bookshelves (using a laser level to make sure all the lines lined up!). It’s the exact same paneling we used in the kitchen. We did this because we didn’t want to carry to wallpaper onto this wall so this helped define it as trim work and we painted it as such!

We also decided to sand down the desktop to a more natural color before painting. We’ll stain and seal it after painting is all done.

The last piece of prep was patching all the knots in the wood with wood filler and going over all the cabinets with a deglosser.

We’ve painted quite a few cabinets in the last year, we have it pretty much down to a science. 1. Liquid Deglosser (this allows you to skip the sanding step!) 2. Primer (here we used a Quick Dry Stain Blocking Primer). 3. 2 coats of paint (This one is an enamel (extra hard!) specific for trim, doors, or cabinetry. Because there was so much to trim work to paint in here, we knew that a paint sprayer would be the fastest method. We used this one again (but we rounded up all of our favorite paint sprayers in this post if you want to check out more!)

One thing we did differently–we DIDN’T take off the cabinet doors like we normally would. There was spacing around each door so we knew they wouldn’t get painted shut. Instead, we taped the backs/inside so that no paint would get inside the cabinet boxes (since we wanted those to remain a natural wood tone they are) and we will roll the back of the doors after these cure. Like I said, we’ve never done it this way, but these cabinet doors don’t rest on cabinet boxes like all of our other cabinets have so we’ll keep you posted on whether this works or it’s a total fail. Hahaha

I can barely wait to get the wallpaper installed above the wainscoting, but I’m so thrilled with how this is looking already. So much softer and lighter.

Hopefully we can get the wallpaper installed this week (we’d prefer to hire it out if we can find a professional!) and the rest of the room should come together super fast!

See all the mood board sources here!