One Room Challenge - Week 5: The Chairs

If you are new to the blog, welcome! I am an accountant 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 years ago and are slowly renovating it room by room.

It’s week five of the One Room Challenge. If you missed the first week you can catch up on it here, the second week here, the third week here, and the fourth week here.

We are overhauling our den for this challenge and we started with a room full of boxes and lots of items that needed to be donated.

Last weekend we finally decided on chairs for the room! We got two of these white slipcovered chairs from Ikea. We put one of them together to test it out and make sure it was exactly what we wanted. We like that they are big and comfy so it feels like you can really lounge, or even fall asleep in them, but I especially love the sloped arms and that they are slipcovered, which means I can wash the covers! Let’s be real… these will turn into dog chairs because what chair in our house doesn’t so the having the ability to really clean the fabric was key for me. We only put one of the chairs together so far because they are big and we still have some finishing work to complete in the room (ahem painting the trim and completing the fireplace makeover – yikes!).

We (by we I mean Nathan) started the fireplace makeover last weekend by cleaning the fireplace out, removing the gold doors, and spray painting the entire inside of the fireplace for a clean slate. Yes, Nathan’s “work” clothes are nice looking jeans and a short sleeve button down… while I am usually much more attractive in paint stained yoga pants and ratty gym shoes.

Initially we had planned (and even bought white marble tile) to retile the fireplace, but after laying the tiles out in the space we decided the tile wasn’t exactly what we wanted and sent us back to the drawing board and 3 stores to determine we couldn’t find a tile we really loved for this fireplace. The white marble was just going to be too stark, especially with the 2 white chairs in the room, but we couldn’t find a darker tile that struck our fancy. Womp, womp. So that leaves us with either a) leaving the fireplace as is, or b) DIYing a fireplace refresh. Which do you think we’ll choose? Hint: that tile is not staying.

Now that we have the chairs and which direction we plan to take for the fireplace I felt I better select a rug. Last week I order this rug and it came in yesterday. If you saw my Instagram stories, I was a bit disappointed because this rug did not look like the pictures online. The blues in the rug are much more pastel that depicted online (you can sort of tell in the image above) so the rug didn’t really go with the moody vibe we wanted for the room. Plus the rug was a tad on the small side! I ordered a 5×8, but I need at least a 6×9 for the room… despite my painter’s tape room planning efforts! You can catch up here if you missed it. Now I am back to the drawing board for a rug too! I’m hoping I can find in time for the big reveal next week, but if I don’t I am going to try to not sweat it because I really, really do not want to buy a rug just to buy a rug, it needs to be the right rug.

Even though the room isn’t finished it didn’t stop me from styling up half of the room and testing everything out together. Styling is my favorite part! Pete was my little assistant and helped out by testing the chair. He loves that he can look directly out the window to the front yard. I told you these will most certainly end up being dog chairs, I mean I guess they already are.

Now that we are in the last week of the challenge here’s everything we need to finish up… now is when I am kicking myself for procrastinating on certain tasks like painting the trim and the fireplace mantle! Anyone else feeling the crunch!? Here’s to a hopefully very productive weekend!