I am currently working on designing a space to use as my creative studio. I started by clearing the clutter out of a room that used to be my brother and my playroom when we were growing up. Overtime, it had become a storage room for toys, old papers and junk. I did my best to throw out or donate the items that I hadn’t touched in years, inspired by Marie Kondo’s method of gracefully thanking the item for it’s service before saying goodbye.

As for furniture, I had a set of my brother’s old mid 2000s natural wood colored desk, dresser and bookcase. While natural wood has come back in style the past few years, these pieces screamed outdated to me since I had been looking at them covered in dust for so long. With the help of Christina Muscari’s Pretty Distressed YouTube channel and the paint department at Home Depot, I learned how to sand, prime and paint furniture. I find colorful spaces both freeing and inspiring, so I picked out a teal color for the desk called Caribe, the Spanish name for the Caribbean. On Etsy, I ordered cane for the drawers because I liked the contrast between the dark teal paint and the light yellow cane. I also found some gorgeous Art Deco inspired knobs on Etsy.

Here is a photo of the dresser that I painted Jade. I left the drawers unpainted and instead covered them with a Chinoiserie wallpaper that I ordered on Etsy. This whimsical mix of gold butterfly, bird and dragonfly pulls were the finishing touch!