Welcome to week 3 of the One Room Challenge hosted by Linda at Calling it Home. As a reminder, every spring and fall, designers and bloggers commit to finishing one room in their house over the course of 5 weeks (or 6 depending on how you look at it). The ORC team select 20 feature designers, while hundreds others participate as guests. This is my first time participating as a guest and it is giving me the motivation I need to finish our guest bedroom before the holidays. So, what have we been up to…
Catch up on week 1 and week 2 progress. Things checked off the list in week 3:
- Removed textured ceiling
- Skim coat ceiling to create a smooth finish
- Caulk the corners where the ceiling meets the walls
- Paint the ceiling
- Sand and stain the dresser
- Spray paint the dresser hardware
- Order light fixtures
Caulk? Why caulk? Great question! When scraping off the ceiling texture, small pieces of the wall peeled off as well. The top of the walls themselves also appeared a bit textured to begin with (think, paint drips). In hindsight, I should have applied a small skim coat along the top edge of each wall to smooth out these imperfections. I didn’t… and I was feeling too lazy to break out the mud a second time. Enter caulk. In my mind, caulk could help smooth out the wall to ceiling transition and fill in some of the areas where pieces of the wall peeled off. I gave it a go. It did not produce the finish I hoped for (skimming would have been better), but an improvement nonetheless.
Ahhhh so light and bright. Starting to tape off the scale of a headboard I have my eye on. There is a part of me that really wants to DIY the headboard too. Time is running out to make this decision.
I have painted furniture before, and stained a few wood-based crafts. The gel stain from general finishes was a good next step. It doesn’t require application to raw wood, although you certainly could, and the stain self-levels making it very forgiving. Pictured below is the drawers sanded and after one coat of stain.
For nearly a week, I contemplated whether to fill in the screw holes so I could replaced the hardware with long sleek rods. If I really wanted to replicate the West Elm Alexa Dresser, I probably should have. The original hardware had a subtle charm that ultimately won me over. A quick wash and paint revived their sparkle.
This week involved 5 trips to Lowes, 1 trip to Walmart, 1 trip to a local hardware store for the gel stain (W.C. Winks), and 1 trip to Sherwin Williams. I plan ahead for a lot of things but that never prevents me from running out of mud, not liking the initial spray paint color, stores being out of stock, and running out of paint.
It’s on to week 4. Things on deck:
- Design the closet doors
- Purchase or DIY the leather headboard
Its a smaller list for week 4. Namely because Nick and I are both out of town for most of it. That means week 5 and 6 will be jam packed with fun and last minute decisions. Chaos I am actually looking get forward to.