One Room Challenge, Week Four – Spring 2020

The halfway point is here!

For those just joining me, I’m a guest participant in the Spring 2020 One Room Challenge, a semi-annual event that follows hundreds of designers and design bloggers through the renovation of one room in their home. I’ve been enjoying reading about the progress of the featured designers and my fellow guest participants.

So… yeah. We are in week four of eight. Are we halfway done? Ummmm…. nope.

The good news is, most of the items we’ve ordered have arrived, the painter is scheduled to start on the cabinets tomorrow morning, and electrical work will follow next weekend.

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We are going with Philips Hue recessed can lighting, which is both dimmable and color adjustable to work with circadian rhythms, and having some LED strip lights installed in the glass cabinet.

Then we have the wall & trim paint, rug project, window treatment, and all the decorating and staging. A couple of cabinet modifications will get worked in over the next 2 weeks as well.

So what happened this week?

The area rug arrived. The good news? We love it. The bad news? The one we ordered smelled slightly of mildew when it arrived. A rush reorder proved to have the same problem, suggesting the warehouse it came from has a humidity problem. So, I have 2 simultaneous fixes in the works:

1. Vinegar, water and sunlight (as in spray the entire carpet with vinegar & water and leave in direct, hot sunlight to kill the mildew), and
2. Order a backup from another source.

On a related note, the base color of the rug is a little creamier and less gray than expected, but we love it so much with the deep blue and the green-gray cabinet color, that we are definitely going to keep the rug and reselect the lighter wall color to something creamier for flow. Paint is much easier to change than finding a different rug we will love as much. The upside is that it makes last week’s paint dilemma a moot point.

The gray we are using for the cabinets is greener than the gray detail that runs through the rug. So, I want to avoid adding any other undertones that will muddy the palette. We will be testing a few similar shades after the cabinets are painted, but here is a general idea of the new undertone we are going for.

Pro tip: ALWAYS have a sample or the actual rug or artwork on site when it is the foundation for your color palette. That is the absolute best way to pull a palette together. In the end, staging and soft treatments can do a lot to help the walls be more forgiving if you make a mistake, but it helps if the wall is the right undertone to begin with.

Next week I’ll have some more exciting progress photos to share! The cabinets will have the doors removed and all interiors will be masked off, then they will be sanded, prepped, primed and then painted with conversion varnish paint. The doors will be taken to the painter’s shop so they can be sprayed in the booth.

Once the cabinet portion is done, we can get to work replacing the ceiling fan and adding the recessed can lights and LED strips.

It’s about to start looking like a project in here!

—

Crystal