Stand Back, This Chick Has Tools

About every three years I get a big old stick up my butt to handle tools and attempt to build and/or craft myself into oblivion. I’m not really sure why it happens, but my hands just get itchy to create something beautiful. In truth, you won’t be blown away by the DIYness of this blog post but I’m here anyway.

I’m supremely lucky to have an office in my home. It’s an actual office too as opposed to a spare room because it doesn’t have a closet which means no one would want to live in it anyway. A few years back we painted the office from butt-ugly highlighter yellow (damn previous owners) to a nice, calm minty/sage green. The kind of color that tells you, “Hey, it’s cool you’re a run-on sentence addict. The universe loves you for it.”

The problem was, the minute you have an office or any spare room for that matter, it quickly becomes the breeding ground for spare hangers, bills that need shredding, obscene amounts of gift wrap and that hideous sweater your Aunt Sissy gave you.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided the root of my lack of literary productivity lay in the messiness of said office and the lack of beautiful and inspiring things to look at.

Nice idea huh.

Step 1: Clean out my office.

When you clean out your office, you find all sorts of totally important things you’ve been desperately searching for, things like this:

Hallelujah! I’ve been searching EVERYWHERE for my high school paper on Madame Bovary, whew!

You also realize you have about 42 (no joke) textbooks on mathematics and basic electronics that you will fight with your husband over tossing because he’ll swear the kids will need them in 2021 and you’ll swear you can find all that boring and unless information online.

You give in, realizing you need this man’s strength and power tools to hang the office cabinets and shelving purchased from IKEA.

The bookcase now looks like this:

I even put all the Dummy books together for easy dummy reference:

After the sucky cleaning was done, I begged Big Daddy P to start hanging shelves. This is the part of the story where we fight because he needs my help but likes to work alone.

See the tape on the wall, MY IDEA. Not of fan of drilling unnecessary holes in the wall. Brilliant if I do say so myself.

Mmmkay, so the tape looks crooked here but it wasn’t. We know this because we used a fancy laser thingy.

Looks good! We now keep paper and computer software in there because you were totally wondering.

As a thank you for hanging the cabinet and keeping his cool, Big Daddy P got this framed picture of himself in badass action:

Next it was time to fill the blank and uninspired wall above my computer. The wall I stare at when the words won’t come. The wall I curse out when my computer freaks out. That wall.

I chose a shelf. A nice, simple shelf that would house things that made me feel happy.

Uh oh, I felt a craft coming on.

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money so I found these old pictures that used to hang in Boy Wonder’s froggy bathroom about 5 years ago:

Froggy bathroom no more, I decided I loved the square beaded frames. Must use.

So I chose a favorite Mommyfriend cartoon Big Daddy P had drawn about the time Boy Wonder told me my butt was big. I printed it on heavy paper and cut it out.

Then I rummaged through the garage for my old scrapbooking paper. I knew I had a ton of it.

I mounted the cut out on the pretty paper and BOOM – fat butt gorgeousness.

I created another masterpiece the same way, using an image found online.

With a little pink spray paint, some patience and that pesky craft bug up my butt I created this gorgeous display above my computer:

I’m super happy with it.

Just for good measure I also hung this sign on the office door…

…because I could.