It’s that time of year again… I am back to do another One Room Challenge.
For those who are unfamiliar, the One Room Challenge is a twice-yearly event that challenges design bloggers to transform a room in 6 weeks. I am joining this fall edition of the One Room Challenge as a guest participant. While I am not one of the 20 featured design bloggers participating, I will be participating and accepting the challenge of transforming a room in 6 short weeks! I will be posting updates to the blog on Thursdays every week, with the final reveal of my room the 6th week.
If you are new to the blog, welcome! I am a financial auditor by day and started this blog as a way to pursue my passion of design, renovation, and all things home. We bought our house two and half years ago and are slowly renovating it room by room.
Last spring, we completed our den as part of the ORC, which you can catch up on here in case you missed.
This time around we are going to be tackling our office! The room is one of three bedrooms upstairs. I am thrilled to have a designed work space where I can finally have everything organized in one space!
This is how the room looked when we first moved it. It wasn’t terrible, except the burnt orange carpet that was covered in cat pee from the previous owners. Gross. This picture was from the day we moved in. Don’t mind the crazy dog barking at the camera – somehow this is the ONLY true before picture I had of this room. I had to laugh because this accurately depicts Susse’s nutty-ness when it comes to all things cameras, phones, and flashlights. She’s a German Shorthaired Pointer with lots of energy – if you have one you know what I mean. She chooses to focus her energy on anything shiny or that creates shadows. It creates some funny moments when people come over and try to use their phones – she basically implements a be present and put your cell phone in your pocket/purse rule in our house without us even having to do anything. I guess that’s not a terrible thing.
Back to the office. We removed the carpet in this room (and the whole upstairs) almost exactly a year ago with good intentions of having hardwoods installed shortly thereafter. Well, life happened, and we realized the cost of installing hardwoods plus the cost of installing a new staircase and railings (all had to happen at the same time) was muchhhh more than we hoped. So, we saved for a few months and finally this summer, we began the overhauling of the entire upstairs. We had new hardwoods floors installed that matched the hardwoods downstairs, had a new staircase and new railings installed (reveal to come soon!), and installed new baseboards. With the floors and baseboards finished this room sat empty for over the past few months because it wasn’t top on the priority list.
The time has come to give it a facelift.
My goal for the office is to create a quiet, relaxed, yet sophisticated space where we can work.
We want the walls to be mid-tone color. I’m leaning toward a sage-y green. We’ll have a desk with a comfy chair, a cabinet for storage, an accent chair for lounging, a soft rug underfoot, and lotssss of organization in the closet. I am planning for this closet to be my home decor stash. I like to switch things up around our house and my goal is to get it all organized for easy access.
One thing I am trying to do is incorporate a lot of items we already own into the design. It’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately (that probably deserves its own post) – I have become very aware of just how much I buy because I think I “need” it, when it’s just something I want and do not need. Yes, I will be buying a few things for this room (desk chair and rug), but I am going to try very hard to make intentional purposes and only purchase items we do not already have. The desk, cabinet, lamps, and chair are all items we already have. For the most part, I will be trying very hard to use my décor stash and shop my house to add the finishing touches to this room. Time to get creative!
Ideally this ORC will be a bit more straight forward than our first two challenges we completed (see the laundry room reveal here and the hall bath reveal here) since there will be no plumbing to deal with or cabinets to construct. With that said, there is still a lot to do in the next 5 weeks!
Here’s everything that’s on our wish list to complete/source for the space:
- clean everything out of the room/organize/donate unused items
- paints: walls, baseboards, closet, and closet doors
- wallpaper the closet (leftover material we have from a previous project)
- install Ikea closet organizing system (leftover material we have from a previous project)
- order and install a window covering
- order a rug
- order a desk chair
- DIY a giant mood board/pinboard
- makeover existing filing cabinet (paint & hardware)
- paint storage cabinet
- hang art
- organize, decorate and style the space!
There’s a lot to do and we plan to start this weekend! I’ll be back with weekly updates for each of the next 5 weeks, but in the meantime be sure to check out the other participants here. As always, I would love for you to follow along as we make over this space! Follow along on Instagram for more updates along the way!
