Two Steps Forward . . .
/Welcome to Week 3 of the One Room Challenge!
For any new readers, the One Room Challenge is a biannual decor and design event that takes place every spring and fall. This Fall 2018 Challenge marks its fourteenth season! Each Challenge there are 20 designers selected to transform a space, and they document their progress every Wednesday for 6 weeks. In addition, anyone with a blog can take part as a Guest Participant. Each Thursday the guests post links to their progress, inspiring and encouraging others as they participate. And that’s me, a Guest Participant! I’m making over my boys shared bedroom, giving it a touch of whimsey and lots of function.
Lovelovelove the rug. The colors are so pretty, and the quality is about as good as you can possibly get for $257. ALSO lovelovelove the green flower chair. In another room they would work together, but it just didn’t mesh in real life in the boys room. I want their room to feel simple, and the combo felt complicated. On paper it worked, so what happened?
Designing a room is not necessarily a sleek and linear process. You can have the best, most complete, well thought out plan ready to go, and then something doesn’t work in real life. Case in point: fabulous chair + dreamy rug = decor competition that doesn’t mesh.
Which leads to this point: STAY FLEXIBLE. Allow for plans to change. The main direction of the boys bedroom is the same, and most of the elements are just what I initially planned… but now we are on the third rug. And you know what they say about the third time being the charm? It’s true.
Once I nailed down that it was the rug that had to change (not moving that chair!!), I decided a giant neutral shag was the way to go. My younger son comes to hang out in my office just to lie on my shag rug.
But have you ever shopped for a 9x12 rug? $$$!!!
I was shopping on a site that had 45% off advertised, and kept trying to do the calculations, all the while wondering why they weren’t showing the sale price, as they usually did. Then I realized they WERE showing the sale price, and $500+ was about as good as it got. Buh-byeeee!
Thanks to trusty old Amazon for a 9x12 shag with great reviews for $155! Remember, boys are kind of gross. I might have cleaned boogers off the wall before I repainted their room. So we’re not spending big bucks on their rug. Maybe when they are older. Though do boys ever get less gross? I feel like we’re just going to move from boogers to modeling clay and stinky socks.
This bedroom has the unique challenges of no ceiling light and only 2 outlets. So I have to run the cord for the floor lamp 13 feet across the room and behind the bookcase to plug it in. The extra bonus of the larger rug (my poor little zebra that is no more was only 7’6” x 9’6”) is that I can run the extension cord UNDER the rug. Yes. I agree it would be better to install another outlet, but it’s not in the works right this second.
The next best surprise was that the rug arrived a week early, tonight as we were sitting down to dinner! Due to it’s giant size, it was folded in half after being rolled, and then plastic wrapped into a giant green blob, so I’m going to let it flatten out a bit more before any pictures happen.
One of the biggest projects I tackled this week was painting the boys doors. The door into their room is in the same corner as their closet door, at 90 degrees from each other. Together they provide an irresistible opportunity to introduce a little more color into the room.
I’ve been debating green vs. blue and bold vs. subtle for weeks, and finally decided yesterday morning it was time to bite the bullet. After pinning about 40 doors, I picked three green colors and painted samples on one of the doors. That clarified things immediately! Green was out of the running, and I would stick to a light blue… or two… Benjamin Moore’s Watercolor Blue (793) and Mystical Blue (792).
All those rectangles took a long time to freehand. Thank goodness for my once a week daycare…
One more area I made (some) progress in this week was lighting. I ordered small wall-mounted sconces from Urban Outfitters, and when they arrived it took about 20 minutes to get them both mounted by their beds. So simple! I wanted something low profile so the boys don’t bump into them at night, particularly on the lower bunk. You will notice, though, that the Emperor has no clothes. I still don’t have the right light bulbs almost a full week later. I also need to get a flat-head extension cord to plug in instead of having both cords sticking out of the outlet.
What else?
I know. This looks mostly the same, except the books are slightly tidier and I swapped out the bins for baskets.
I’ve done the black-wash treatment to the wood for the KALLAX unit, and thanks to my dad have also cut it down to size (I don’t have a table saw of my own… yet.). Next I need to sand/poly/sand/poly it, then attach the wood. So that will be another week or two, depending on weather and time management.
Plenty still to come, from art and textiles to dressing up their curtain panels, finding the perfect thrifted footstool / side table for next to the chair, sorting out bedding, and pulling together the ceiling treatment. Moving full speed ahead!
Be sure to check out the 20 featured designers and all the guest participants on the One Room Challenge Blog, link below! There are some great projects happening, and I’ll be sharing about some of them coming up soon on Instagram. Be sure to follow me on the ‘gram to be in the know!