One Room Challenge: Week 4 Dining Room Progress
Week 4 already!
Well folks, week 4 of the One Room Challenge has already arrived! 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!
construction Progress: we painted the entire first floor of our house!
The past few weeks have been crazy! If you have been following along from the beginning, you’ll know the backstory as to why we painted the entire first floor of our home. In short, our dining room is not really a “room” but more of a space in our open floor concept.
And our home wasn’t always set up as an open floor plan. When we first moved into our home about two years ago, we decided to move a staircase to make the whole space feel more open. To save some money, we decided to take on all the finish work ourselves - this meant drywall, spackle, sanding, painting and trim work. Fast forward nearly 2 years and we hadn’t quite finished the project, so we are using the One Room Challenge as a push to finally finish this project!
So here we are, week 4. We have finished all the drywall, spackle, sanding and now PAINT! Of course it’s not 100% finished (we still have the accent walls to paint!!) but reflecting on the progress we have made over the past few weeks has felt really great.
The pictures don’t do this paint job justice! I know this subtle change of paint may not seem significant, but just imagine staring at that semi finished space for about a year, knowing that you still have some work weighing over you. The fact that we have pushed through and finally wrapped the majority of this up feels so good! Also, weirdly enough. the paint above and below the stair is the same color - lighting impacts the look of paint a lot!
So, some other scenes from our week:
From left to right: Andy making the most of his situation and enjoying the only comfy chair in our living room; The hubby, trimming out the ceiling WITHOUT painter’s tape; Dinner served on our side table in the middle of our kitchen, I sat on a cooler; Andy, putting up with the chaos, but also pouting slightly because he’d rather play with his toys; Mark (in his underwear) and I painting on Saturday AM.
Did you peep the 5 gallon paint bucket in the left side of the first picture? Shout out to the guy from Fairmount Parks Conservancy who saw me in the Lowe’s parking lot STRUGGLING to lift that out of the cart and into my car. After watching me give it 3 honest tries (and probably only lifting it about 4 inches) he offered to help. Thank’s guy, you saved our One Room Challenge.
Painting was a big task, but it was pretty straight forward. We (Mark) painted the entire ceiling as well as all the walls on our first floor. We kept the original color the same, but used an eggshell finish. Originally all the walls were done in a flat finish, which meant that they did not hold up well in high traffic areas like our living room and kitchen.
Mark is a big proponent of trimming out by hand rather than using painter’s tape. I have come to realize that painter’s tape never quite works the way you are hoping it will and it takes forever to prep and put up. So we skipped this step and went straight to trimming out by hand. I ended up helping with some of the trim work on the walls in our dining and kitchen and surprisingly did pretty well. I think the lack of painters tape made me more cautious, and because of this the end product looked a lot better than the other rooms in our home that I painted using the tape at corners and edges.
There’s not too much more satisfying than a freshly painted room. It’s got me thinking about other spaces in our home that I’d like to paint! (Just kidding, Mark - or am I??)
It has been a rough few weeks, but the end is in sight!
In an effort to keep this week’s progress update short and sweet, let’s jump to what’s next! Over the next two weeks we will be focusing on the pretty stuff. We have some accent paint and trim work to take care of first. Then we will be installing the GREEN WALL and grow lights! I also just received a call this week that our new chairs have been delivered to Pier 1 so I will be making my way down to South Philly to pick those up and assemble them. I am proud of the strides we have made so far, and can’t wait to share the finishing touches over the next two weeks with you folks!
Do you have any questions about our progress or space? Let us know in the comments below!
PS: if you want to see some other talented designers’ room transformations, click on the image below to see all the guest participants in the Spring 2019 One Room Challenge!
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!