One Room Challenge: Week 3 Dining Room Progress
Hello again!
Welcome to our week 3 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 our design reveal post to read up on all the things we have planned for our space!
design Progress: we are changing up the design!
This week I wanted to start with the pretty, because we are still in the thick of construction. Things are certainly progressing and things look good (more on that soon)! But we still have a waaaaays to go before I can share those sparkling photos with you. If you have been following along with our posts here and here you know we have been very apprehensive about what to do along the wall with the windows. Initially, I was certain that I wanted a beverage cooler that was semi “built-in” and overall just an area that would function as a bar for us. Upon further research, I learned that the bev cooler would require an additional 5 to 6” behind it in order to let air circulate behind it to properly cool. This ultimately would eat up too much space in the dining room, which is already quite small, so for the past two weeks we have been reconsidering our approach to this area.
We are swapping the elaborate built-in for a much simpler solution. As I have mentioned the room is relatively small, so I am adding a big oversized mirror to make the space feel bigger. As a bonus, I think it will reflect the live green wall across from it so it’s sorta like more plants, right?! We also decided we’d like to introduce a small bench below the windows, something we can pull up to the table when we extend it to fit more guests. I have a new one picked out that would work, however I am going to continue to peruse our local consignment and salvage shops for something because I have been really wanting to introduce some unique components.
Last week, I also mentioned that I wasn’t thrilled about the chairs I had originally selected. I was looking for chairs in a very low price point and had looked at least 50 different chairs. I eventually impulse ordered to take advantage of sale (anyone else guilty of this??) and realized when the chairs were delivered that they were made of plastic, not wood as I had originally thought. I tried to make them work, but they just didn’t have the right feel next to our new, solid wood dining table.
I had my eye on a gorgeous chair from Burke Decor, but at $320 per chair, that wasn’t realistic for our budget. So after much more searching, I found this chair at Pier 1 for a much better price. Stylistically it is not nearly the same, but I really love the look of it and felt much better about the price. I actually went to the store to see them in person, because I didn’t want to risk ordering more chairs that I would be unhappy with. New chair order has been placed and I am looking forward to picking them up in the next few weeks!
Lastly, the other change we are making is to the color! A year or so ago I had painted the wall a purpley color, but I think a terracotta/pinkish hue is going to work better with both the kitchen and living room. It will also bring a bit more warmth to the space and soften some of the more modern elements. I think it also pulls out the richness of the wood tones in our floors more than a cooler color would. So stay tuned for that next week, when I share our painting progress!
construction progress: sanding drywall & spackle
Before I dive into “our” construction progress this week, I want to give Mark a huge shout out for all his hard work on the house these past few weeks. He has been putting in so many extra hours after he gets home from work to help me create this beautiful space and I am so appreciative of that. He works hard and agrees to nearly everything I say - what a guy! I’ll stop fangirling now, on to our update:
Mark and I had done one previous round of sanding drywall and spackle in our home about a year and a half ago. At that time we didn’t fully prepare or invest in the right tools to do the job. We sort of just started sanding and “embraced the mess.” I think I mopped for about 6 weeks straight on all floors of our home (the work was primarily done on the first floor) because dust was literally EVERYWHERE. It was such a huge mess and we were definitely discouraged to take this task on ourselves again. This time however…
Mark and I, smiling, because we were quite pleased with our progress ;)
…We prepared much more thoroughly. We closed off the space we working on with plastic drops to limit the amount of dust that would waft up 2 floors. I placed blankets over all the vents (and shut off our HVAC) so that dust would not get into our ducts and spread further through the house. Mark also picked up a sander from the Lowes near our house and we duct taped it to our shop vac. This probably made the biggest impact of it all in terms of time and mess. There was significantly less to pick up this time around and we breezed through the areas we had left much faster than the time we had done it all by hand. Now I know it looks like a mess, but honestly we looked around when we were all done and we were impressed by how little dust there was this time around.
Proud of this mess this week. We spent an extra hour or two prepping for this task and it made all the difference when it came time to clean up.
Finally! We are through with the mess of sanding. Honestly, because of our first experience with sanding in our home, this task had been weighing on us so much. The weight has definitely been lifted and we are looking forward to moving on to paint! Especially with our new fun accent color direction. Be sure to check in next week to see our paint progress. We will painting the entire first floor - all the walls and ceilings. It’s a big task, but if we can make this big push we should be on track to complete this transformation in time!
What do you think of our design changes? Let me know in the comments below!
PS: if you have any good terracotta color paint recommendations, please send them my way!
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!