SO EXCITED TO POST THIS! My first One Room Challenge is officially in the books. It’s been a rough past few days but we made it through to the end; the family room refresh is complete & the entire family is in love! Many of you thought I was crazy to take this on with a full time job and a 4.5 month old (and I admit, I didn’t factor in teething, itchy baby eczema, and sleep regression), and you were all correct. I was crazy. Definitely could not have done it without tons of help and support. But this room is crazy, too – crazy GOOD, and crazy affordable thanks to lots of lucky thrifting, talented friends, and sponsored (FREE) furniture beauties! In case you’re just joining in, here’s a quick recap, with links to the first 5 weeks’ posts if you care to peruse. Long story short, our most-used room in…

Yikes. Five weeks has flown by and I gotta be honest, Mama is TIRED. I knew when I signed up for the One Room Challenge that it would be a lot to manage even a simple room redo with everything going on, but factoring in a very itchy and sleepless four & a half month old with eczema has taken away so much of our energy & made this a heck of a stretch for us. Milo is definitely first priority, and normally I’d just let a project like this wait until we’re all in a better place, but free stuff means deadlines so we’re in it to win it, sleep or no sleep! The good news is – this past week was huge! The three biggest “brightening” elements are officially in place – the new carpet, the gorgeous new Interior Define sofa, and my crazy hare-brained faux wall (which…

Week 4 of the One Room Challenge is here, and I’ve got a bit of practical progress to share, as well as some thoughts on – how’d you guess? – distractions and disappointments. Since I don’t have a great image depicting these terms, I’m throwing it back to one of my OG wood paneling pics to show how I originally convinced myself that this wood was too good to paint over or get rid of.  And dear sweet Jerry the giraffe is always a crowd pleaser, even if he HAS retired to the basement at the moment for an indefinite sabbatical. So back to the ORC. In terms of practical progress, NO, I don’t have any fun alien lamp progress to show you cuz #didnthappen. BUT, we did get the carpet issue worked out and installation is happening next week HOLLA, and we got a finalization on the sofa delivery…

Well friends, if you thought last week was light in content, you’ll love this week. We are SUPER light in content this week, and by that I mean we’re focusing on getting that room brightness at max exposure wherever we can, using every trick in the book. Some of these tricks include: 1. ALL the mirrors 2. Lamps lamps and more lamps 3. Get rid of shady stuff 4. Go back and forth a million times on where to judiciously use a little white/light paint… You can see what I mean about mirrors and lamps in this glamour shot here: Getting rid of shady stuff was a fun step for Scott this week. The french doors at the front of the room lead to a little covered porch on the far end of the front of our house. We’ve primarily used it for storing wood, and the sizable stacks of…

[ interior inspo via Eaton DC hotel ]   The first week of the ORC has flown by, and not only is this post late (had every intention of posting Thursday morning), it’s also a little light in content – at least in terms of appealing images! It’s that awkward stage of the project where you’re waiting on one or two key things before everything else can follow (for us, it’s waiting for the carpet install)…so it’s a bunch of hurry up and wait in terms of big-picture room design stuff. Regardless, we’ve been busy with lots of prep work, finalizing plans, and apparently procuring lamps – my two faves from Brightech arrived on Saturday, and they’re just as awesome as I hoped they’d be. And then I found a real weirdo lamp on Craigslist that everyone hates but for some reason I SUPER love…which brings me to the “meat”…

  I’ve posted about our family room before, so if you’ve been around for a while, you know it’s got some “unique” characteristics that tend to inspire a love/hate reaction. The wood paneling is gorgeous, solid, and….well…not for everyone, the room only has technically ZERO windows, and the floor currently sports a nice yellowy-tan wall to wall carpet situation. So I’m forever trying to dream up ways to brighten and lighten the room without going for the nuclear option of painting all the gorgeous wood white! The idea of a lighter sofa was appealing, since it’s the largest piece of furniture in the room, and we’ve been talking about replacing the carpet since we moved in, so when I found out Interior Define was interested in a collaboration, I jumped at the chance to get this room in a happier, brighter state. And call me crazy, but when I found…