Hey all…I’m joining the One Room Challenge as a guest participant! I’m a long time follower of the event, but this will be my first go actually joining in on the fun. I thought about joining a year ago last Spring but wasn’t ready as a newbie blogger, this past Fall did not work out, and I figured if I’m still considering it a whole year after it first crossed my mind I may as well take the plunge and just do it. We haven’t finished all that much in our house as far as actually decorating entire rooms yet, and I’ve been itching to paint away the pervasive gray walls but indecisive about where to start. This is the push I needed to just pick something and get started. Here we go!
Since we have a pick of any of our living spaces as options, we decided to consider what would be the biggest impact on our quality of life. And our room of choice is….(insert drumroll here)….
Our primary suite! Soo, technically a bedroom, bathroom, water closet, and walk-in closet. Not one room exactly. But we’re not doing a renovation of the bathroom, and I’ve had a vision for what to do in here for a couple months now so the whole picture should come together okay over the course of the challenge, I think (famous last words HA). I have a lot of the high impact pieces in place and decisions made, but the execution is really sloppy right now and the ORC is my push for accountability to get it on track.
Our Primary Suite Before Images and Challenges
The space I’ve shared the most in our house is this seating area in our bedroom, and the view I wake up to every morning, which makes it easy to ignore the other problems in the room on a bleary eyed walk out to the kitchen for coffee.
The most personally offensive part of this room is how well the gray walls photograph. When you turn to face the bed, though, the you can see the paint is far too close in value to our tan cane bed – a problem admittedly of entirely my own creation. The paint color is still up in the air at this point, I could go in a about 7 different directions. I’ll discuss more in a separate update post. Today I’ll just cover why we’re starting in here for my first ORC.
The crux of it is it’s not a retreat at all. It’s more like a spiral of chinoiserie delight at first glance down into clutter town, a very humid place replete with foregone drywall maintenance and lacking basic finishes like a toilet paper holder and a closet that is somehow never fully purged. The bones are so good, but it’s been neglected far too long in many ways and it needs a variety of TLC to live up to its potential.
This suite was a renovation that was started some years ago by the previous owners, but not completely finished – particularly a lack of temperature control. Central A/C was never plumbed in ($$$ since it needs its own system that runs independently from the main house A/C), and we had major moisture management problems in the Spring-Fall seasons until we figured out the best settings on our mini split unit (we added it our first Summer here) and portable dehumidifier.
The problems I’m planning to address in our primary suite are:
- humidity marks and damage on walls
- water closet is lacking basic finishes
- peeling drywall behind sinks
- closet space not maximized
- need to purge old clothes (AGAIN)
- lack of personality
- mini split is an eyesore
- dehumidifier will need concealment
- contemporary bathroom finishes not our style
- need swim towel/suit airing solution
And then there’s the elephant in the room, which we will likely wait to address at a later date due to COVID: our currently un-usable walk-in shower. We’re hoping to make it useful again for pool season, but there is a leak somewhere in the shower pan that drips down into the crawlspace below. Pre-COVID we had several contractors look at it and all concur it’s a gut-job since there’s no way to tell for sure what damage has been done. Since our vaccines won’t kick in to full immunity until June, we haven’t gone out shopping or enlisted contractors yet – we’re just not comfortable with it.
We plan to see if re-sealing and caulking and a shower curtain wall in the shower (yikes) are enough of a hold-over to make the shower functional so that one of us can at least use it while the kids are being bathed – it would be a major time saver.
After starting to purge our primary bedroom closet a year ago, it still isn’t in great shape, and we have rotating bins and bags of donations and seasonal clothes that we just haven’t gotten into a good rotation system since moving back from Seattle, where no off-season clothing storage is needed.
One Room Challenge Primary Suite Mood Board
You can follow along with other One Room Challenge participants on the blog. I’ll be back with an update next week!
C’est tout for now.
Maura
