Let’s just put it out there, shall we? I failed miserably at completing the office project in the 6 week time frame for the One Room Challenge.
But looking on the bright side, at least it motivated me to get the project started and make a ton of progress on our much-needed office makeover.
What was the hangup, you ask? Well the plank wall took way longer than I thought. Cutting, sanding, nailing, filling nail holes, priming, painting, adding trim and caulking were so time consuming! And finding the right butcher block desk top proved to be much more of a wild goose chase than I had anticipated.
So anyways, here we are 8 weeks later and this is what the office looks like now.
I wanted our desk top to be deeper than the filing cabinets, but what I found was that most places only carry 25″ counter depth butcher block AND for the life of me, I could not find anywhere that carried butcher block that would be long enough to span the length of our office. I checked Ikea, Lumber Liquidators, salvage yards, lumber yards, and even priced out custom counters online.
Finally, I found a specialty wood store in Seattle called Crosscuts that carries 30″ deep butcher block counters in a variety of long lengths and different wood species, all finished and sealed with a food-safe urethane. We found that their prices varied drastically depending on the species of wood. We had hoped to spend less than $500 on the desk top.
My vision for our office included a dark wood desk top, but their walnut butcher block was priced WAY higher than we had anticipated spending at $1300. So we decided to go with their least expensive wood species, maple, at $600 and planned to refinish it to make it darker.
So we paid, loaded up the maple counter on top of my car, and headed to the nearest wood craft supply store. 
Each person we talked to at the store gave us a different story of how we should go about making our counter darker, but they all agreed on the fact that it was not going to be a simple sand and stain kind of job like we had thought. It was going to be a lot of work and may not turn out as good as we had hoped.
We are all for do-it-yourself projects and saving money, but the thought of spending another couple of weeks refinishing a piece of wood that may not even turn out good sounded like a terrible idea to both Jacob and me. So we got back in the car and drove back to Crosscuts to exchange our maple wood for the walnut. 
It physically pained us to spend that much money on our desk top, but it was so nice to get it home, cut it to right length, and put it right into our office without any extra work. Sometimes it’s just not worth it to do-it-yourself.
I just love walking by our office now and catching glimpses of that beautiful piece of wood.
Now we just need some office chairs, lighting, art work, and accessories. Unfortunately it’s probably going to be awhile before we can purchase some of those things since the desk top cost us so dang much.
In the meantime, I have some other (cheap) projects to share with you, so stay tuned 
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