Happy Friday, I hope everyone is having a great week!! Before we sign-off for the weekend, I’m excited to check-in with some office progress. For those of you who are just joining us, you can get caught up on our plans to transition our current guest room into an office here. Long story short this room used to be our guest room. Because it’s the brightest room in the house and we only use it as a guest room 10 out of the 365 days per year, we decided to transform it into an office that will allow us to get a lot more use out of it. When you live in an 1,100 square foot home, using every square inch wisely is important! You can read more of our plans in this post, but here’s a mood board of what I’m envisioning for this space. I want it to be light, bright, minimalistic yet very hardworking. Some of you also mentioned that you would really love to see a floor plan of this space to visualize what is where. (Why didn’t I think of that?!) Here’s a rough sketch of the floor plan of this space and the furniture I have planned (tentatively).

With the fauxdenza and shelves, I hope to add our own style and lots of secret storage but before we get to all that fun stuff, we needed to choose a paint color and get to work painting this space. The guest room was originally painted with Benjamin Moore’s “Moonshine” when we first moved in. I liked the light grey because it was very versatile but I was never obsessed. This color showed blue undertones at different times of the day. I love blue but I was going for more of a pure grey in this space and I never felt like Moonshine fit that look. Plus, there were LOTS of holes in the walls from hanging shelves and art that used to be in here, so I knew that whether I wanted to change the paint color or not, I would still have to patch and paint. I’m trying to test different looks and figure out if I enjoy living with these looks now so I have a better idea of what I want to incorporate in our forever house. One of the looks that I’m currently loving and want to see if I still love after living with it is white painted walls.

I’ve seen so many gorgeous white spaces recently so I thought this “new” office would be the perfect chance to see if that white paint is as good as I think it is in pictures. decorating ideas for storage roomsBut believe it or not, choosing the “perfect” white paint was a lot harder than I anticipated!exterior designs for mobile homes Choosing The Perfect Whitehome decor diy painting I looked lots of white paint swatches and narrowed it down to my top 3 choices. I wanted the paint color to be clean and bright but also with a warmish undertone. I really wanted it to feel warm and not super sterile because I was afraid that if the color was too bright white, it would look brighter than the trim and doors in this space.

I was concerned that this would then make the doors and trim look old and dirty. So I bought a few samples and painted them next to the trim all around the room. Behr’s Ultra White (TOP) Behr’s Polar Bear (MIDDLE) Behr’s Falling Snow (BOTTOM) I added each color right next to the closet door, but I also painted this same combo next to the window trim, base board, and in the darker corners of the room. I wanted to read the true color in all different parts of the room and at all different times of the day to make sure I was making the best decision I could. Seeing the paint next to the trim really helped me narrow down the winner — Behr’s Falling Snow. I loved that this color was white and clean but still seemed like it had a bit of a warm undertone (at least in relation to my trim). The Falling Snow was also the winning contender because it didn’t make the trim look dirty. Painting a Room – Tips & Tricks You can get a full step-by-step tutorial on how we patched and painted this room here on Zillow’s blog.

It was the first time I used bright pink spackle and I LOVED IT. Not only did it seem super crazy to slap on bright pink anything onto our walls, but magically when the spackle was dry the bright pink dried the color of traditional spackle. This made figuring out when each coat was dry super easy, which helped speed up the process just a bit. <— Every little bit helps, right?! Now that the paint is dry, I’m SO excited about the bright and clean look of this space. Let the fun begin! It does seem very plain right now with white paint right next to the white trim, but I’m so excited to add furniture and decor to this space so that these pieces can be the “stars of the show” rather than the wall color. Decorating around white walls is very new to me but I can’t wait to give it a try! Does anyone else tuning in have any experience with white walls? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks before we get started. Next on the to-do list is building a fauxdenza so that our office has lots of secret storage.

If all goes as planned, I’ll have more updates on this DIY Fauxdenza next week! Next month we will celebrate 4 years of blogging. We really can’t remember our lives before this blog, but then again…we still feel like we just started this crazy journey! During these 4 amazing years, we’ve learned a lot about blogging. A heck of a lot. Before we began The DIY Playbook we… For last week’s style series, we chatted all about our favorite athleisure wear. Those items were some of our favorite for both lounging around the house and in less frequent cases…actually working out! Today, we wanted to chat a little bit about how we each workout and share a few of our healthy-living goals for… To us, Happy Hour is a time to sit back, relax, and catch up with friends. It’s a time to chat about everything and anything, and that’s exactly what we bring to DIY Playbook’s monthly Happy Hour.  We want these monthly posts to be a chance to catch up with friends and bring just a…

Real Talk: I’m a pretty organized person. I’m not perfect or obsessive about organizing but I can confidently say that if you were to stop by my house unexpectedly, it would look pretty close to the photos you see here on the blog… maybe without the fresh flowers all the time or the bed made on… I wish I was writing this post about 6 months ago because that would have meant that I didn’t drag my feet on this decision for the past 6+ months and I finally made progress! But instead, I’m sharing my new bedroom light fixture today because I have hmm-ed & haw-ed for the past few… We may not watch a ton of football, but we’re always game for a little tailgating or homegating!Who could resist an excuse to get together with family and friends, while snacking on way too much unhealthy food?! We don’t do a ton of this throughout the season (our hubbies prefer to actually watch the games)… Today’s Wardrobe Staple – Athleisure Just to make sure we’re all starting today’s post on the same page, let’s first start by defining what the heck “Athleisure” is.