Mid Century/ Industrial Office Designs

Whoo!! I am getting pumped for this weekend. Con- Man's last day of school is tomorrow! My baby will be in Kindergarten next year. I am excited to be able to relax a bit during the week- not have to wake up early and make lunches, get everyone dressed in the morning, rush to get to school, ect. (Though am kind of dreading finding activities to keep us occupied all summer long). Also we are going camping this weekend!!! We are going up to a lake near us for the night. Nothing to hard core- fishing, smores, lake swimming. All around fun. And to top it off I'm going on a shopping trip with some girl friends! This is a big deal since we live in the boonies and have to drive an hour to go to a Target. Yay Memorial Day Weekend!!!

Anyway- recently I completed a small project for a client's office. I was excited about this one because it involved 2 of my favorite design styles- Mid Century and Industrial. There are two owners and each needed furniture for their respective office. One loved Industrial the other loved Mid Century. I like that these styles can work together so having the two in offices right next to each other works.

Option 1

Option 2

Both of these Options speak to the Industrial style but in different ways- one is more hard edge with the metal and filing cabinets; the other softer with the wood tones. The pieces could even be mixed and matched if they client so choose. And I love how they were open to original one of a kind pieces of furniture as well.

Next up was the Mid Century Office:

Option 1

Option 2

Again both of these options have the Mid Century Vibe but in different ways. The client specifically asked for some sort of Eames chairs and wanted bold color. I am loving those Eames chairs in the first option! The colors are awesome!!

Do you have a dream office style??

Modern Wood Veneer Wall Art

You know those projects that you think might be pretty easy to do? So you go for it thinking you'll be done with it at the end of the day, have an awesome project to show off on your blog, only to have it be more difficult than you thought and anything that could go wrong does?


Ya, that was me yesterday. Hence this very late almost didn't happen because I was going to throw this project out the window blog post. Why am I sharing this with you? Well I while back I made a commitment to share more of the truth of what happens with some of my projects; they don't all go smoothly.


So here we go; with some persistence I was successful with this project in particular!!

I had ordered some wood veneer wall covering samples a while back; thinking I could do something pretty cool with them with my Silhouette. 

If you want to try and order some of your own I ordered mine from www.koroseal.com. They came quickly and were free, I just had to fill out an order form. An excited Rep may call you about your upcoming "project" your choosing samples for- I just thanked her and told her we were still deciding and would let her know....


After I received my sample inspiration struck. Last week I was talking about Mid Century furniture designers; and how I wish I could own some fabulous pieces. Since I don't see myself purchasing any in the near future I thought some miniature versions would suffice in the meantime.


I downloaded images of a few of my favorite Eames chairs:

Then resized and cut them out them in Photoshop so I could import them into the Silhouette program.

After importing into Silhouette I used the "Trace" Tool cut out the shape. Otherwise the machine was only recognizing a square instead of the chair image I wanted. Then I set my print settings to cut the veneer. This took some trial and error to get the right cut depth and speed as you can see:

I wasted two sheets of my veneer with cutting problems which really irritated me. This was probably more of a user error than a Silhouette issue though.

Finally I found the right cut settings. I discovered that using the Card Stock thickness option, a slow cut speed of 3, and setting the depth of the needle to 9, and choosing the double cut option worked best.

Finally success!! It popped out pretty easily but I had to use a nail file to sand down a few of the edges that didn't cut perfectly.

Next for my wood panel I used a piece of scrap pine board I cut down to size, then sanded and painted white.

I used all purpose Gorilla Glue to adhere my veneer chair to the wood panel. I set a book on top to hold the veneer chair down. 

I thought I had used hardly any glue, but when I lift my book up later I discovered that glue had seeped out everywhere! My panel was ruined! Ugh I was so upset. I didn't want to start all over cutting and painting a whole new piece of wood. And I didn't want to waste even more veneer.

Instead I was lucky enough to be able to peel the veneer off the painted wood. Thank goodness!! See where the glue had seeped out? What a mess!

SInce the veneer came off cleanly I flipped my wood panel over and tried again. This time I barely used any glue at all. 

I was hoping to have a whole Eames Veneer Chair Collection to show you today but after all that trial and error I'm glad to have one for now. I like the way it came out. You could even do different color paint for the background depending on the look your going for.

Have a great rest of your Monday!!