This was our bonus room.

We used to have the craft table up here and the space served as our combined office/entertainment/catch-all room. At first it was nice to always be working/crafting/gaming together, but then it got crowded and seriously messy. (Photo from 2013)

It’s also where all our guests slept budget-style on a blow-up air mattress. Five star experience when you stayed with us!

The thing is, it’s an awesome space with 10′ tall ceilings and abundant sunlight. It just had been neglected and underutilized for far too long.

Not to mention,  I already stole the green desk for the studio downstairs; thus sabotaging Handsome’s work set up (if that’s what you want to call this labyrinth of electronics). Don’t even get me started on that hideous office chair.

Handsome and I are very different people when it comes to surprises.

I love them and he.
does.
not.

Which stinks because I equally enjoy planning/implementing a surprise and being surprised. But Handsome likes to be prepared, mentally and physically, for any given situation. So, I have adopted a sneaky compromise.

You see, when Handsome travels for weeks at a time or deploys for months on end, I have a distinct advantage in the surprise department. I don’t feel obligated to tell him about the “special projects” that I work on while he’s away. Then when he comes home, I get a little of that surprise factor and he’s usually so glad to be back that he doesn’t mind that I’ve kept fun secrets. Most of the time the big reveal is just stuff I’ve built or rearranged for the house. But in our pre-kid days, I even managed to purchase the actual skiboat that he learned to water-ski on as a child (and held true affection for) from a family friend and shipped it 800 miles to greet him!

I digress.

With the kids and I relocated to the new studio, it was high time our favorite guy get a space all his own. So I decided the bonus room would be my next target for a surprise makeover. The look I set out to achieve was “sophisticated mancave.” The new space had to function comfortably as his office, the guest room, family hang out and provide storage solutions for currently homeless decor and books.

Today I wanted to share a few of my inspiration photos (all courtesy of Pinterest, duh).

A masculine workspace was a must. I like the industrial look that’s all the rage right now, but I also didn’t want it feeling overly rustic.

Both this room and the one below have grey walls, chunky crown molding, and a dropped detail molding. Definitely liked that. The muted palette and book display in this one are cool, but overall it’s too mid-century chic.

Handsome doesn’t have trophy heads to mount, but I wanted to incorporate items that do reflect his interests and hobbies. A leather pull-out couch for overnight guests would be nice and a grey/brown color scheme to finish the look. This particular room is a little too gothic.

Bookcases were key to getting all his books and mementos displayed in an orderly fashion; looked up several ideas for how to style all that stuff.

I also wanted to camouflage the TV into an eclectic gallery wall similar to this, with a furniture piece below for additional storage.

So I started with a blank slate: white walls, builder grade carpet, no moldings, basic window trim, and zero furniture. I couldn’t post any of this in real time (while Handsome was gone) because he reads the blog and would find out! But now that the room is finished and he is enjoying it very much, I’ll be sharing a few posts about how his new sophisticated mancave came together.

Just keep in mind that while the posts will only take a couple weeks to write, in reality it took me several months and a village of help to pull it together!