I made it to week six of the One Room Challenge! This is the big finale!
A quick refresher: the ORC is a challenge for featured and guest designers to complete the design of a single room across a six week time-frame. It sounds like no sweat….until you run into all the big and small issues of designing a real-deal space. Six weeks is a super tight timeframe for creating a design plan, ordering products and implementing the design; a quality design typically takes several months to plan and implement. Yikes!
I chose to makeover our guest room, which began its life with us as a very bare-bones guest room (for a maximum of one guest) and slowly, over time, morphed into a storage unit/enormous, accidental walk-in closet. It had become a real monster and the Spring 2018 ORC serendipitously coincided with my mom coming up to visit and stay with us for a week…so at the 11th hour I made the decision to dive right into it and take on the challenge. It was time to get the monster under control and take back our guest room!
Quick summary of the past six weeks:
Week one: Massive decluttering
Week two: Space planning and gathering design inspiration
Week three (the halfway point!): Setting up the bed and purchasing foundation bedding
Week four: Decorative accents and soft goods
Week five: Decorative accents continued
Week six: Installation of design and the big reveal!
After decluttering, setting up a queen size bed and purchasing bedding, the room was suitable for its first guest! My mom stayed with us for a week after I made the room presentable just in time for her arrival.
The project was put on pause while she was here, and then kicked into high gear as soon as her visit was over. In an attempt to stay ahead of the curve, I ordered new curtains and decorative throw pillow covers, prior to taking a breather from the project, in hopes these items would be as perfect in real life as they looked on my computer screen.
With this project happening at warp speed, however, I was back to square one when my online purchases failed to meet my expectations within a narrowing window of time.
I quickly attempted get things back under control by making multiple trips to HomeGoods and other local retailers in search of pillows and/or curtains that might coordinate with any of my initial purchases. Extra compromise and ingenuity was needed to bring the design together and I had to keep an open mind about what I was able to find and how it would fit my vision for a traditional-modern room that felt somewhat formal, without feeling stuffy or boring.
I found nothing in the way of pillows in the right size, pattern or color combo. And for curtains, I found even less, so I moved my search to local fabric stores. This opened the door to a whole slew of possibilities and gave me renewed hope for working back in some of my initial purchases.....but also provided more options in general and, well, I bought a lot of fabric. Like, a lot.
Even with all that fabric, it wasn’t going to be enough for three, 96” long curtain panels, so I kept on searching HomeGoods. I found a whole lot of nothing, until one day, I hit the jackpot and found two options that seemed promising:
They were more floral than I initially envisioned for the room, but the colors seemed promising and they checked all the boxes for length, header type and number of panels. I brought these home and narrowed the options with the fabric I purchased for pillows. Then, I got to work.
I started sewing, sewing, sewing.
Once the pillows were sewn and decisions made, I started putting things in place. Curtains were hung, pillows were added to the bed, and this bad boy I found at a flea market a couple years ago was perfect as a focal point above the bed:
So....are you ready...??
Ta da!!
It was a tough call, but ultimately, I stayed with the striped curtains. They still have a touch more red (read: pink) in them than I’d like, but they seemed to strike the best balance with the other patterns I landed on for the pillows.
The lamps were a pair I had already had for a while that hadn’t worked out for our downstairs living area, but like a good hoarder, I held onto them anyway. I almost didn’t include them in the guest room design because they were a little bit too tall and bulky with the shades they came with.
One of the lamps with its original lampshade (and also, sorry the room looks super haunted in this photo??):
I made yet another panicked HomeGoods run for shorter lamp options but then remembered I had smaller shades stored away (sometimes, it pays to be a hoarder).
..Voila! Slightly shorter, slightly less bulky lamps!
And to give the room a personal touch, I added some of my mom’s awesome art to the nightstand.
I wanted to incorporate more art into the room and ran out of time for an entire gallery wall above the dresser, but plan to work on that in the future...
...because a designer’s home is never, really, ever finished. ;)
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