Shelf Ledges in our Office

A while back I showed you one side of our upstairs landing area where we built in a bookcase.  Today I thought I'd give you a peek of the opposite wall.  I'm just about finished painting, which means now it's time to work on the fun stuff... decorating!  

Our upstairs landing sits between a bedroom and the playroom.  We actually use this space as an office, but I also wanted this room to be for my girls too, since we spend quite a bit of time upstairs.  My theme as we've been remodeling is "old schoolhouse", and so I was on the hunt for some vintage children's alphabet cards.  I didn't find any actual vintage cards, but I did find these cards at Anthropologie and I absolutely love them.  

I thought and thought about how to display these cards and couldn't come up with anything I was satisfied with.  Then I mentioned it to my husband and he came up with the idea of building a couple ledges for the cards to rest on.  All these ledges are made out of is a pine 1"x4" and quarter round.  The quarter round sits a little higher than the 1"x4" so that the cards have a place to sit. I wanted the warmth of wood in the room, so I opted to stain.  This is a mixture of natural cherry and dark walnut.  (This was my second experience with staining and I definitely think there must be a trick to it, but I have no idea what it is!  Let's just say I think it is much easier to paint!)

The shelf ledges sit above our desk.  This wall seemed so bare and white after painting, so I was thrilled with how much cheerfulness the ledges and cards added.

 The desk is built into the wall and was made by my husband.  As with the built in bookcase, we wanted to build the desk in as well to eliminate bulky furniture in a narrow walkway.

The desk is 8' long and the top is made out of hardwood flooring we found on clearance.  (You can see from all our ugly office equipment we really do use this space as an office... I almost had a hard time posting this picture after viewing so many gorgeous shabby craft rooms around the web!)  You can see here we added a couple schoolhouse light fixtures and I finished painting the stair bannister last weekend. 

The chairs were something we have had sitting in the attic for many years... they were blue with a light oak seat.  I painted them in ASCP Emperor's Silk with a coat of clear and dark wax.  I stained the seats to match the shelf ledges.

Thanks for letting me show you a glimpse of our progress... now I'm anxious to get working on the other projects I have planned for the remaining bare walls!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend.