One Room Challenge: Week One…Living & Dining Room Makeover by Swatts & Co
A little more than two months ago I was in San Francisco at the Design Influencers Conference sitting less than 6 feet away (those were the days) from some awesome designer friends chatting about the One Room Challenge.
The One Room Challenge is a bi-annual interior design event where designers/bloggers/home renovation enthusiasts transform a room in 6 weeks. It’s a super fun event that I’ve watched from afar for years.
Some of my friends were participating this year, and I was lamenting that I didn’t have any rooms in my house to re-do as I had literally just finished my whole house. (I know…poor poor pitiful me).
So I did what any rational human being would do, and I sold our house and we bought a really old house that needs a little loving. (that may not be exactly how things went down, but you can read about the whole selling your house right before a pandemic story here).
So now I have a room to re-do. Because of all the stay at home orders and this whole deadly pandemic thing, the theme is sort of a DIY and use what you have type theme depending on location and what’s going on due to Covid…also due to Covid, the ORC has been extended to 8 weeks. Which is nice since we just moved into our house two days ago, and it’s still filled with boxes.
I am going to be transforming our living room and dining room and maybe the entry way…depending on how much time I have and how long I can lock the three children outside.
Before
The house was built in 1928 and is a Folk Victorian house. (fancy talk for a poor persons Victorian because it ain’t got no frou frou stuff going on).
It might not have frou frou stuff going on, but it has arched built in bookcases and a tiny fireplace, so I was sold.
Few rules for designing this house: Needs to be semi-budget friendly, since it will eventually be a rental. Since it’s going to be a rental, I’m trying to go with colors a large majority of people don’t hate, because I don’t want to repaint 14 times. I’m going to try to re-purpose and re-use as many items as I can for these spaces.
Dining Room Before
Our last house was very modern, so it’s going to be a fun challenge to take items out of modern and put it into an old space.
I’ve been super into blue and red as a color combo for the past few months, so I decided to run with it.
Below is a mood board for the living room.
It’s a crap shoot if any of it actually turns out like the picture, because a lot of samples I need for the project are delayed because of Covid (how dare these people delay production for their safety) so I don’t know if I’ll be able to order what I need.
A lowdown on the pic: We own the couch and the two chairs, the brown chair will be reupholstered. The rug was in our master bedroom in our old house, and is gonna make a primetime appearance. The rest is all up in the air.
The dining room is connected to the living room via a 5’ wide arched doorway (yay for arches!) and will sort of go with the theme, because can you have too many themes?
I found a table on FB marketplace for $40 that I’m going to sand down and paint a high gloss blue (table in pic just for inspiration). Some potential fabric for curtains, and we’re going to re-use our media console from our TV room as our new bar. (somehow the liquor got unpacked prior to the kids toothbrushes). We are going to re-use our cesca chairs and pair modern with old.
If you want to follow along as we go on this journey, click below to sign up and get on our email list.
You can also go to the One Room Challenge website and follow along with the 20 featured designers or hundreds of guest participants like me!
To see following weeks, click on the links: (To see where we started, click here: Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Six, Week Seven,