Pallet for Home

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR!!  It's so hard to believe we are already in 2012! As one of my classmates pointed out yesterday, this is my graduation year!  In about eight months I'll be out on my own! Hooray!

I hope you all had a great New Year!  I had a big night playing Call of Duty and drinking Moscato! Haha!  My hubby is a cop and he had to work, so I decided to just have a relaxing night.

Once I finished up all my Christmas gifts, I got started on my office renovation.  I've been obsessing over it for months now, waiting for Christmas break so I could begin. 

The photo above is to remind you of the before - bright and fun, but I'm ready for a more mature look.

Here is the office with it's new paint color and halfway finished:

*SIGH* I'm in love!  The color is Handcast Pewter by Better Homes and Gardens.  I had it color matched at Home Depot in their Behr paint plus primer in one.  It covered beautifully!  We ended up putting two coats on the wall, but that's not bad considering the bright color we were covering.

The wood desktop will be stained of course.  I will also be putting in an additional desktop where you see the bookcases.  This will make a "T" shaped desktop work area - I'll have the long desktop for sewing and office work, and the "T" desktop will work as a cutting area! 

I have a lot of big plans for this space, and I'm moving along as quickly as I can!  I won't show you anymore peeks until she is all finished!

But I wanted to share this awesome paint trick I thought up while painting.  Well, not really a paint trick, but a cleanup trick.  I'd like to think I'm the first person to think of this, but you geniuses have probably been doing this for years!

I always do the edging when the Hubby and I paint - this is my favorite paint container to use.  It has a handle and a magnet on the inside that will hold your paint brush when you're not using it.  AWESOME!

They have a special plastic liner that fits inside perfectly.  It's also pricey, so I use gallon size Ziplock bags instead.

Now that's not really the genius part.  I know people use shopping bags and all that fun stuff all the time. 

My brilliant idea came to me around 1am when I was ready to clean-up.  I had paint left in my Ziplock bag.  Just enough that I couldn't justify throwing it out.  But at the same time I felt too lazy to dump the paint back in the gallon bucket, knowing I would probably have to use my little container again tomorrow.

DUH! It's a Ziplock bag!  I just zipped that bad boy up and set it aside to use the next day!  I had never done this before and wasn't sure how the paint would hold up.  It held up perfectly!  The next day my handy little paint bucket was ready to go and all I had to do was open up my bag.

This may not be a big deal to you, but in my delirious early morning state-of-mind I thought it was genius!  Just thought I would pass it along in case just one person needed this idea!

I hope to be back next week with my full office reveal, but we'll see how that goes!

Cheers!