One Room Challenge Week 3: Planning and More Planning

Welcome to week 2 of the Better Homes & Gardens One Room Challenge! If you’re just joining in, you can check out my first or second post where I talked about how we picked the living room as our project and the design plan we have in mind. This week was a week of planning and procuring materials. The real fun begins this week. But first, here’s what we did in week 3 week.

We have been trying to figure out of what kind of wood we want to make the coffee table. The legs we got are rubber wood, a light-colored, common wood used by furniture makers. The wood we have for the top of the TV console is hickory, which is the closest match to the foyer table. I would like the coffee table to be a close match if possible. We went to Menard’s because we know someone who buys all of their finished grade lumber there. However, they only had one inch thick pieces of hickory or anything close at two different stores. Now, we’re trying to figure out if the stain we use could be enough of a cover so that we could get a lesser wood, like the pine used in our sample. More to come on that.

I am still waiting on my Loloi rug. The latest estimate is that it’ll be shipped the first week of November. Fingers crossed, but I’m also starting to look for something else just in case.

I have started to think about the banister and spindles on the staircase. I figured out that we can actually replace the spindles without removing the bannister or newel posts (and I’ve learned some vocabulary). This means that we could totally change the look of the space for very little money, in just about a day, maybe two. Let’s just say I’m very excited about that prospect.

The biggest development this week is we’ve started to plan the recessed panel wainscoting on the two-story wall. We purchased all of the wood materials we need–there’s a whole bunch of 1×6 primed MDF boards and base cap molding. I was very surprised at how inexpensive it was, but it follows the theme of this room–sweat equity and a little bit of money should make for a major impact. I’ll go more into depth about how we planned out this wall, but, in general, the first thing I did was decide whether we wanted a more classic, uniform shape, where all of the boxes are the same height and width or a more modern pattern with boxes of different sizes. In order to decide, I took to Instagram stories.

As you can see, I explained the two choices, gave a couple examples, and wow, it was not even close! I was sincerely surprised, but I agree with the results. I had originally thought that I would use the classic wainscoting pattern, but as the project got closer, I started leaning towards the varied boxes. This poll just confirmed it for me, so thank you Instagram friends!

We have a plan of attack for this huge wall. We have all of the materials, including scaffolding, in our garage. Now, we just need to start. Wish us luck this week that we make some progress this week and maybe even for a rug delivery!