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 by Calling it Home is a twice-yearly event that challenges design bloggers to transform a room in 6 weeks. I am joining this spring 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 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.
Last fall we completed our laundry room as part of the ORC, which you can catch up on here in case you missed it.
This time around we are going to be tackling our front room, which we plan to use as a den aka the library and music listening room. The room is directly to the right of the front door when you walk in our house so it’s one of the first things you see.
This is how the room looked when we first moved it. It wasn’t bad, just not a lot of personality. The carpet was outdated and the walls were dirty. Not the best first impression when you walk in the house.
After we moved in we painted, installed new hardwood floors, and installed new baseboards. It sat empty for over a year because it just wasn’t top on the priority list, until recently when we moved moved almost the items from our upstairs to this front room, our bedroom, the dining room, and basement while we prepped the upstairs for a complete overall (removed the carpet, installing new floors, and repainting every square inch of the upstairs). Well, we have removed the carpet from the upstairs, had the popcorn ceilings scraped and paint, and that’s about it. We got a pretty delayed getting new flooring because we realized we need to completely redo all of our railings and banisters before getting hardwoods installed… which is a project we have planned and will be tackling at the same time as the ORC for the den because we a crazy!! More to come on the plans and progress of the upstairs, but for today let’s focus on the plans for the den!
Currently the den it is still not making a good first impression, mainly because it is filled with so. much. stuff.
Our goal for the den is to create a relaxing, cozy space where we can retreat to read, listen to music, or work from the comfort of a cozy chair.
We want the walls to be dark and moody. Two chairs to curl up in are a must with a ottoman to put our feet up on. The fireplace will be getting a complete makeover. Then we will layer in new window coverings, a rug, lots of lamps (because the room has no overhead lighting!), art, books, and decor. Ideally this ORC will be a bit more straight forward than our previous two challenges we have 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 room
- install gas insert in fireplace
- retile & paint fireplace
- paint room
- window coverings
- two chairs
- ottoman
- rug
- lamps
- art
- side/console tables
- bookshelf
- decorate and style the space!
There’s a lot to do for this space 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. 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!
