By Mi-Ling Stone Poole –<\/p>\n
DEAR MI-LING: My husband retired from the State Chamber of Commerce last week. We\u2019re creating an upstairs home office for him, embracing years of economic development and nonprofit accomplishments.<\/p>\n
The challenge is finding an attractive way to display wonderful awards, plaques and artwork he\u2019s received over the years \u2014 still making a professional place where he can work, but homey.<\/p>\n
Kris<\/p>\n
DEAR KRIS: One of the most important things you can do for your hubby is to help him create a comfortable space to continue his legacy while transitioning into his new life.<\/p>\n
Your job will be to find out what direction he wants to go. Is he interested in writing, building a business, nonprofit work or a new hobby? His response will help you find a theme. Once you have a theme, use themed accessories to soften the room.<\/p>\n
Utilize the wall space, but also buy your furniture wisely. Look for floating shelves and cabinets that will keep the space flowing.<\/p>\n
Ask your husband to go through his collection and edit out pieces that you can place in leather-bound books or scrapbooks.<\/p>\n
Select the most important and meaningful items for framing and hanging on the wall. Space them evenly and use frames with similar colors and widths.<\/p>\n
One tip: Place everything on the floor and create your design. Cut old newspapers to size and tape them to the wall to get the desired look, then make a mark for the nails.<\/p>\n
To avoid creating a “memorial,\u201d use whimsical accessories, family photos and comfortable furniture in the design.\u00a0 Pile on the layers of his personality.<\/p>\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Mi-Ling Stone Poole – DEAR MI-LING: My husband retired from the State Chamber of Commerce last week. We\u2019re creating an upstairs home office for …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[82,161,307,310,336,423],"class_list":["post-699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ask-mi-ling","tag-chamber-of-commerce","tag-family","tag-photos","tag-pictures","tag-retiree","tag-trophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/trophies1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/699\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mi-ling.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}