A Man Cave For My Man

While Nick was planning to go on a short camping trip over the weekend, I had plans of my my own. I wanted to update our ho-hum computer room and surprise Nick at the same time. So, I came up with a baseball themed room which was inspired by Nick's favorite team, the San Francisco Giants. Luckily, Ikea has some great orange accessories and what I couldn't find in orange became orange with the magic of spray paint.

Like the novice blogger that I am, I forgot to take before pictures. I remembered and then forgot... and then I remembered when I was painting and forgot again... and I remembered and forgot one more time. The room was a pale yellow which had a few baseball inspired items including prints and photos, signed baseballs, a bat, and a couple of accessories. The new room is much improved though with tan walls and the Giants' orange that unites the room. Also, rearranging the furniture helped to open up the room and make it look bigger (before, the computer desk was out in the middle of the room). Take a look for yourself...

Baseball photographs and prints adorn the wall. Many of the frames were spray painted black by my fabulous mom (and then hung on the wall by my fabulous dad). Some of the photographs are very special to Nick's family and some are special to mine. Also making the cut is a print of three small paintings Nick and I got from a street vendor in San Francisco. The print includes paintings of a cable car, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Lombard Street.

This dresser used to be Nick's growing up. Before we moved, we stripped the paint and refinished it. It needs new hardware on the front, but a good lesson was learned from this project. Make sure you can find hardware to fit the already drilled holes first!

I wanted to give Nick a nice bar area. I added three floating shelves to house all of the empty liquor bottles we have been saving for the past couple of years. The full bottles are now easily accessible. Instead of trying to climb on top of the fridge to get them, they are right at our finger tips (by ours I mean Nick's and his friends).

I purchased a white tray from Target and my mom spray painted it orange to bring some color to the bar area. In addition to the bottles, I added a glass pedestal vase full of matchbooks.

Perhaps one of my favorite pieces in the room is the vase full of matchbooks. My mom bought a humongous bag of matchbooks from an estate sale. The woman had been collecting matchbooks for many years and the wide variety really illustrates the efforts that she made. There are so many unique matchbooks ranging from ones that were given as wedding favors to hotel and restaurant matchbooks and random ones like the bail bonds one shown here. My mom displayed some in a large wine glass at her house and I knew I had to recreate the look at ours. Although we don't regularly use matches, they really add to the bar feel.



These three little, inexpensive circle rugs from Ikea add a lot to the room.




Thanks to my wonderful, hard-working parents, this beauty of a room came together minutes before Nick got home. I love the room, but more importantly, Nick does too!