The Suite Revival: A real office tour.

As most of you know, I have a full time job at a local college. Thankfully, I love what I do and the people I work with so it often doesn't even feel like work! Well, back in July, we had a bit of restructuring with some retirements and department shuffling and with that shuffling I was moved from the front office/reception area into an actual office! My job remained the same but I now have a door and I love it!

As soon as the idea of moving into an office came up, I began scouring Pinterest for some ideas on how to decorate! I found a ton of beautiful spaces but they all had one common denominator - they were home offices. In a home office you can paint, choose your own furniture, float your desk in the middle of the room, add a great rug, curtains, etc.

In most cases, you can not do those things in a office-office. You're stuck with file cabinets, white walls, and stock desks. So I thought I'd share a few things I brought in to give my work office a little personality!

Here's my door! It has my name on it and everything :-) A big plus to this space is I have a large floor to ceiling window with a green space view. Granted my back is to it most of the time, but still. A view is a view.

I found this colorful notepad in the Dollar Spot at Target!

Have you noticed how hideous most traditional office supplies are? Black plastic is not my cup of tea so I found this little jar at HomeGoods and filled it with my essential writing gear. Believe it or not, my favorite pens are these uber cheap ones from Bic!

This little guy traveled all the way from Scotland and is now living in my overhead cabinets.

I have my "R" which I picked up at a boutique in New Orleans.

One of my favorite scriptures (Philippians 4:8) hangs just behind me in a frame that I sprayed purple.

Again with office supplies, most are just terrible and have no character! Luckily, I found this industrial looking tray at HomeGoods to serve as my inbox. It's the perfect size and I actually like when I see things in there! You can find a similar one on Amazon here...

This was a standard beige document stand which I gave a coat of white spray paint and then taped off the back to create some purple stripes. It definitely livens it up as much as a document stand can be livened up, right?

My lamp and owl add a little color to this corner of the office. The lamp was spray painted in Rustoleum's Coral Isle and I picked up the turquoise owl from Ross. A similar one is available on Amazon here. I brought the mirror in from home, which I got at IKEA years ago. This is my view all day and I love the pop of color!

Here's the larger view from the doorway...

And finally, I have this large wall above my little console table. I've been trying to decide on what to put in that space since July and haven't found anything that really grabs me yet, so it's remained empty. I was toying with the idea of a map inspired gallery or maybe one large colorful painting. Whatever it is, I haven't found it yet so it's will stay this way until I do!