One Room Challenge Week 4: The Paint

It’s week 4 of the One Room Challenge. The One Room Challenge team has extended the event by one more week to assist participants affected by the recent natural disasters. The extra week is also nice for people like myself who were moving at a snail’s pace this past week and did not accomplish nearly anything on their to do list!

If you are new around here, we will be completing our laundry room (which is also our pantry and what we call our “dog room”) for this 6 week challenge. You can catch up on week 1 here, week 2 here, and week 3 here.

When I said I was moving at a snail’s pace on this room redo the past week I was not kidding. The only thing I accomplished was painting the 3 walls that are not wallpapered white (instead of the previous blue-ish gray that they were). At least it’s something, I guess?

The snail’s pace work stems from two reasons:

One: Last weekend we intended on spending most of the weekend knocking out the installation of the cabinets and finishing the accompanying built in shelves. However, we got distracted by ripping out all of the carpet in our upstairs (aside from one bedroom). Yes you read that right. We decided to start another project in the middle of our laundry room renovation. We are crazy. The main reason we decided to rip out the carpet is because we have a bulk trash pick-up this weekend (it’s once a year in our neighborhood) that includes carpet rolls! We knew we already wanted to rip out the carpet because of its age and this was the ideal time to do it because then we wouldn’t have to pay to drop it off at the local dump. The secondary reason we wanted to rip out the carpet is because one of our dogs has taken to treating an upstairs rooms like a litter box (not normal behavior for her, but we think the previous owners had a cat that did the same in the bedroom so maybe she is marking her territory). Womp. Womp. It was just time for the carpet to go… just conveniently in the middle of the One Room Challenge. Insert eye roll emoji here.

Two: Sometimes when designing a room you are so confident in the direction you want to go. Well this is how I felt with the laundry room (specifically the stenciled tile floor). After painting and stenciling the floor I realized I think it is a little bolder than how I thought it was going to look. I really love the stencil and how it turned out, but the white and black I used are so very stark. Maybe I should have chosen subtler colors? I am not sure. Currently I only painted and stenciled the laundry room, but this flooring runs throughout our kitchen as well and there is a very noticeable “you stopped here line” between the laundry room and kitchen. I cannot (and was not planning on) leaving the kitchen tiles unpainted. However, I know in my gut it would be wayyyyy to much (for me personally/visually) if I were to continue the black and white stencil throughout the kitchen. So do I leave the laundry room stenciled? Do I paint over it in a solid color that I will be comfortable continuing into the kitchen as well? I worry if I leave the laundry room stenciled and just paint the kitchen tiles in a solid color it will look very DIY , instead of intentional and cohesive. I know I do not have to make this decision by the end of the One Room Challenge, but I would like to have the room I reveal be the room I am going with (flooring included). So… I feel very conflicted and stalled on this decision, but I have given myself a dead line of this weekend to get it figured out. I’ll keep you posted on my decision.