One Room Challenge: Week 2 Dining Room Progress
Hello there!
Welcome to our week 2 progress update for the One Room Challenge. If you are new around here, my name is Johanna. My husband, Mark and I are transforming our dining space over the course of 6 weeks - sharing our weekly progress right here. Curious about our design plan? Head back to last week’s post to read up on all the things we have planned for our space!
Construction Progress: installing drywall and spackling our dining room
This week’s update on our dining room construction progress is short and sweet - but don’t assume that means this phase is quick or easy! Thanks to Mark we have made some serious progress with the drywall and spackling at our “new” basement stair. He’s put in a lot of extra hours after his main gig to get the drywall up and spackled over the course of several days. Here’s a look at the transformation below the staircase:
Here is an unstaged progress photo, because this is more of a true reflection of what it is like to live through a renovation. This is some real life chaos that we are experiencing, but knowing that it is just temporary is helping us push through!
In addition to the drywall and spackling, we have also installed this gorgeous walnut wood trim to our railing wall at the stairs. We both wanted to pull certain details throughout the three spaces of the first floor to tie it all together. The waterfall edge mimics the waterfall of our butcher block in our kitchen. And we have used this same walnut for our shelving in the kitchen and living room.
Despite the chaos, now that the drywall and spackle are complete, the room is starting to take shape! We still have a lot of the construction progress to make by sanding down this newly spackled area & the ceiling (which was spackled probably about a year ago). After we sand everything down, we will be repainting the entire first floor. I love the now open concept of our first floor, however that means no real spot to stop the painting. With one space flowing into the next that means will we be painting all the way through.
furniture progress: why i order furnishings early during design projects
I have placed the bulk of the furniture and furnishings orders for the room and pieces starting to arrive. It may seem a bit early to start having new pieces delivered, but typically I like to get furniture & finishes delivered before the day they are needed for install. This gives us time to inspect the items to make sure nothing is damaged and is as we expected. If not, we still have plenty of time to send an item back and get something new. The only challenge about receiving items early is that we have very limited space for storage. I still need to sell and/or donate a lot of our other furniture so the first floor (and basement and second floor) are filled with half opened boxes and more furniture than any one townhouse should hold.
Our dog, Andy amidst a sea of new furniture in boxes. He’s handling the chaos better than Mark and me.
We received our incredible grow lights from Soltech Solutions, which we will be hanging above our live green wall. I took both of them out of the boxes and plugged them in to make sure both worked. I am SO excited to get these (and my plant babies) installed!!
I messed up the shipping address for our Wallygro wall mounted planters (anyone else struggle with the google chrome autofill feature??) so those were not delivered and instead were shipped back to the manufacturer. Thanks to their fantastic customer service team, we should have the correct address worked out and I should be receiving those soon. Another reason why I am glad I placed orders early!!
The bar stools are in and the faux leather seats match the leather armchair we have in our living room much better than I anticipated, so I am thrilled with those!
Our new dining room table is a #stunner. This was our splurge item, because as I had mentioned in week one’s post, I had some very specific criteria for the table. Also, I saw this as an investment piece, something that would hold up to repeated use and that I wouldn’t feel the urge to swap out in just a few years.
The dining chairs are another story. I was rushing when I placed the order on those and didnt read the specs closely enough. Truthfully I had probably already spent 10 to 15 hours looking for the perfect chairs and I just wanted it to be DONE. So I ordered the ones from our initial concept design to find that they were made of polypropylene (read: plastic) not a wood/wood veneer as I had assumed.
They look super cheapy (I mean, I know they were cheap) but especially next to our gorgeous dining room table. so those are going back and I am on the hunt once again for the perfect chairs. Stay tuned on this.
lastly, progress on our beverage cooler/built-in bar idea:
We’ve been second guessing ourselves on the beverage built-in cooler ever since we figured out the cooler needs an additional 5 inches of air space behind it to properly cool the drinks. We think it’s going to stick out too far into the dining space, which is already quite small to begin with. This weekend we set out to a few local salvage stores to see if we could get a funky reclaimed piece or make some ourselves. We didn’t find exactly what we were looking for, but we did get lots of ideas of what to do ILO the beverage cooler built in. Here are some photos of some pieces that interested us:
Stand by, in the next few weeks I’ll share some new ideas for that little nook!
Next week, I’ll be sharing progress on sanding all the drywall/spackle we have completed. Last time we sanded I was cleaning up the dust for 6 weeks after. I’ll be sharing some tips on how we were able to reduce the amount of dust this time around!
What do you think of our progress so far? Cheer us on with a comment below.
Seriously, this is the challenging part, Mark and I need some encouragement!!
PS: Check out all the other talented designers participating in this Spring’s ORC by clicking the image above!!
It is finally time to share our Dining Space! It’s been quite the experience to transform a space in our home over the course of 6 weeks. And by “quite the experience” I mean it was a ton of work, but dang it feels good now!