Ready for Week Two of the One Room Challenge?

Now that you’ve seen the Before (and the Currently), let’s talk about our plans for the After.

I really want to embrace color and pattern in this space, even though my natural inclination is to go with an all grey space and be done with it. Because I’m a big baby and am scared of pattern, I asked my partner in crime, Amanda of Amanda Louise Interiors, to help me create a cohesive space that blends my love of neutrals with a few pops of color and a big, bold pattern.

We decided the best way to handle that big, bold pattern thing was to have a local artist, Andrea, paint a feature wall.

Yes, a feature wall.

From shades of white to a hand painted feature wall in a bold pattern, things are potentially getting insane around here. The wall is in progress and already looks stunning but I am for sure anxious to see how all of the elements are going to come together.

To keep our budget in check (because we did just do an entire renovation, so the goal here is not to get crazy re-doing a brand new space), we are using all of our furniture with the exception of our coffee table.  We are keeping our couch, rug, pool table (duh) and chairs, which means we get to focus our cash elsewhere and spare my more fiscally responsible better half a heart attack.

To punch up the color in the room we are recovering the two chairs – in fact, they may have already been recovered once already – and we may have chosen a horrific fabric and created the worst chair fail of all time (to read all of the details head over to Amanda’s blog). I really did want the chairs to be redone in emerald green velvet but in all honesty, I did not take our lifestyle into account before falling in love with the idea. Amanda was sweet enough to tell me that velvet + a wild toddler baby was a terrible pairing and we’ve adapted the plan accordingly. And I’ll admit that I didn’t want to adapt the plan until I saw the chairs after the first round of recovering. So, we are on our second round of fabric and this time we’ve gone with a gorgeous, rich shade of seafoamy grey that I love.

With our budget in mind, Amanda has been spilling tons of super sneaky design money saving moves and I’m loving it. We ordered the world’s ugliest (and insanely inexpensive) poufs from Amazon and had zippered covers made for them by a local seamstress. Not only we were able to choose the fabric and trim but now I have covers that I can toss in the wash when needed. We’re also using IKEA curtains as the base for new window treatments and just selected curtain rods from Amazon that will have a special touch added to make them unique.


Our biggest money saving project is for sure going to be the resurrection of what was supposed to be an IKEA hack to make a set of Billy bookcases and shelves look like built ins. We never finished the hack and it never looked built in. At all. We’ve called in my newest artisan crush, TJ of Slab Woodworking to help us create something that is stylish, neutral and has the capacity to store a ton of random stuff.

The piece is also in progress and I can’t wait to see it completed.

With all of that said, here’s our To Do List:

Move the TV from the back wall to the right wall
Recover two arm chairs (again)
Turn the disaster of an IKEA hack into a useful and beautiful piece of furniture
Find a new coffee table to fit the space
Recover poufs to provide more seating for kiddos
Paint the feature wall
Flip the sofa to the back wall and re-position the new entertainment center under the TV
Use IKEA curtains as the base for new window treatments
Find an art piece and use framed family photos to balance the TV

See you next week!