One Room Challenge Week 1: Design Plans and a Tough Choice

Last Spring, we completed Better Homes and Gardens One Room Challenge in our master bedroom makeover. We had so much fun, I’ve been dreaming and planning of our next ORC challenge. Tonight marks the official beginning of the Fall One Room Challenge, which I’ve been highly anticipating, but I have one problem. I cannot decide which room to do! So, I’ve decided to lay out my design plans for the two rooms on my mind and, hopefully, it’ll make things clearer to me. Or, perhaps you will all have a preference and it’ll push me firmly towards one or the other.

Pros and Cons of the Two Rooms Under Consideration:

The two rooms in question are our master bathroom/ensuite and our living room. The pros of the doing the master bathroom include the fact that I have much of the materials I need since I was considering doing the master bath at the same time as the Spring ORC in our master bedroom. I have the wallpaper, the mirrors, light fixtures, and tile pattern for painted tile. I’m pretty sure I have the majority of the design plan figured out.

I would love to use a specific technique to makeover the existing countertops, and it would be really nice to figure out if it’s a viable solution now on a smaller countertop. That’s because if effective, I would turn right around and do it to our ugly kitchen granite, which is one of the things I dislike about our house the most.

On the other hand, I would love to redesign our closet, connected to the master bathroom, at the same time, and that is potentially beyond our capabilities right now. Plus, this design doesn’t excite me as much as the living room.

Now, I’m so excited to do the living room project. I sit in there and stare at each of the parts I would love to change, plotting out my moves.

I have very little of what we’ll need to complete the design, but that’s because the plans include a lot of wood working and DIY. There are also so many projects we could/want to do in the living room, and, given that it’s a 2-story, large room, several of them could be pretty large.

However, we could take them in order, smallest to largest, and see how far we got and I think I’d be very happy. The projects also are not very expensive, but rather, would require a lot of our time. Finally, several projects would involve us doing wood working together, which could be a lot of fun. However, woodworking is Paul’s new hobby, so many of these projects we’ve never done before.

So, on to the design plans and mood boards…

Design Plans and Project Lists

Master Bathroom

This project would just be a facelift for our master bathroom to get us through until we can gut the room and completely renovate the space. I would plan to use pretty much everything already in the room, including the current vanity, tile, shower, and tub.

Paint would be the name of the game here. I would paint 3 of the walls, likely in Revere Pewter to match the master bedroom. I would paint the tile on the wall around the tub and shower, likely a bright white to freshen and brighten up the space.

I would level out the file floor so it’s smooth all the way across it and then I’d use a stencil to paint the octagon floor tile. This is what would likely take the most of our time.

I would paint the vanity a rich green color, which is just like the green that’s going on the basement stairwell walls and possibly the kitchen island. This example is from Mackenzie from Craven Haven.

Brass and wood accents would warm up the space, the scalloped wallpaper would bring some movement and interest as well as move the eyes away from the eyesore that is the giant tub on the opposite wall. I will, however, be playing up the full sized soaker tub, though, by creating a little spa moment around it.

I’d finish the space by swapping out the faucets and adding an adjustable roman shade to the window to match the shades in the master bedroom.

Our projects for the master bathroom would include:

• Paint cabinets & replace handles
• Replace mirror, light fixtures, faucets, bathroom hardware
• Paint the tile floors, possibly level it first
• Add wallpaper to one wall and paint the rest
• Replace window shade
• Possibly replace the shower door, or paint the metal hardware
• Faux marble treatment on the countertop
• Organize the cabinets

Here is my mood board. Can you envision the space?

Living Room

The second option is our living room. We’ve already done a significant amount of work to this room. When we bought this house, all of the walls in living room, foyer, and second floor loft were texture painted–and not just a faux finish with a sponge kind of texture paint. Oh no. This was the kind of texturing where they took a textured roller to apply some sort of compound to the wall AND THEN applied a couple layers of beige and brown paint on top. It.was.awful.

I firmly believe it was one of the reasons our home sat for so long on the market–people could no see beyond the overwhelming amount of texture painted walls. So, before we moved in, we had all of these walls sanded, skim coated, and sanded again. The dust was intense, but it was so worth it.

All of the walls are now Sherwin Williams Alabaster, which is lovely. The color is so versatile, especially for a white paint. It’s really fun to watch the color on the walls change throughout the day with the sunlight. So here is where we are now:

In this room, our projects would include:

• Mantel upgrade (deeper and possibly sanded and stained rather than white)
• Fireplace surround tile replaced or painted
• IKEA hack of the cabinets under the TV
• New: rug, extra long sofa, and arm chairs
• DIY coffee table

The Loloi rug would anchor this space beautifully. Since I’m eliminating the second sofa and only adding a single armchair, I want to get a very long, at least 100+ inch sofa. I want to bring a warm, caramel-colored leather into the room, either in the sofa or the side chairs. The coffee table would be DIY from scratch, just like Tiffany @mymodernrustichome did, though I would use a white washed oak stain.

As for the TV console/toy cabinet, I bought three IKEA Eket cabinets when we first moved in and I have been planning to hack them ever since with cane fronts, an additional piece for a seamless top, new legs, and added handles. It would look fairly similar to this example from s actually an IKEA hack and the good news is that there are now several examples with tutorials online now.

I want to change the ugly faux marble fireplace surround, but I think I would either paint it, or use faux tile similar to the octagon penny tile above. It would soften/modernize the fireplace and help ground this two-story wall of windows. I also want to update the mantel, making it deeper and little more modern as well.

THEN, IF there is enough time, there are two projects that I would LOVE to fit in. First, I would love to update the spindles on the stairs to a black iron option and, hopefully sand and stain the banister to a lighter color.

The second project, which would probably be the biggest we’ve ever tackled ourselves, is to make a feature wall on the two story wall along the living room and foyer. My instpiration is this gorgeous rescessed panel wainscoting wall from Jenna at Jenna Sue Design Co.

I would keep that wall Alabaster, but I like the idea of larger squares all across the wall. I think it would be the kind of transformation that would stop people in their tracks, like when we painted our brick home white. It would just completely change the space and give it the grandeur it is calling for. Now, we have access to scaffolding, we have several tutorials, include Jenna Sue’s, and we learned a lot completing the feature wall in our master bedroom for the Spring ORC. As you can imagine, the project would be massive.

So, there you have it. Two choices, the master bathroom and the living room. They’ll both be tackled in the next year, the question is which one comes first for the Fall ORC. The good news is, doing this exercise of getting my ideas out of my head and into design plans has really helped me think through each project and, I THINK, pick one!

For now, however, I’m going to leave you in suspense. Instead, I’d like to see which one you think we should do. Leave your vote in the comments as well as any other questions you may have!