WEEK 5 // ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: CALIFORNIA CASUAL LIVING ROOM

In today's post, I'm sharing another update on the road to our California Casual Living Room, designed for the One Room Challenge. In Week 5, I'm turning focus away from art and windows to the adjacent narrow dining area that is essentially an extension of this space. 

Just prior to the start of the fall edition of the One Room Challenge, there was already quite a bit of progress made here through paint, moldings and new wood flooring. The former owners had utilized this area as their formal dining room. But in designing some of the more functional aspects for our own use, my husband and I felt it important to keep it casual and skip any fuss. We designed and built our own counter-height dining table from simple steel legs, powder coated in black and a wood table top from African Mahogany. For the past couple of years, that is all that existed in this pocket of our extended living room - that is until this past summer when we added four director style chairs to the mix. 

New molecular-style statement lighting helped to create some visual interest here and casts a pretty glow from both inside and outside the expansive windows that look out onto our backyard fire pit. One of the challenges we've faced in this redesign was that the space is quite narrow and tunnel like. Adding a large scale mirror near the window allowed for a lot of natural light reflection within the space and helped us solve that design dilemma. 

You can also see in the before and in-progress after photos above that we worked a bit to update the original aluminum window with paint and molding - that is after we painstakingly scraped off the dated mirror-like film from said windows (THAT was fun, but sooo worth it).

This past week we also turned focus to the credenza area. We wanted to elevate our IKEA cabinets with a new top - to both warm up the ultra modern feel (hard to tell here, but the cabinet fronts are glossy white) and hide the cabinet seams visible from the top. The cabinet itself is working well and the fact that it floats helps to balance out the heaviness of the furniture in the center of the room.

I took a trip to our local lumberyard and had them cut some white oak boards to size. In the coming days, those boards will be glued up and refinished into a solid top which will then be screwed into our credenza for a more finished look. I'm already loving the way it ties in with the new floors.

So a quick update again this week, but things are progressing nicely. Our frames and artwork arrived just yesterday so my homework this evening will be to begin the framing process. Lots of anticipation for the outcome here. The artwork is one of the elements I'm relying on to help tie everything together for my design. Cross your fingers for me... 

In the meantime, be sure to check out the work in progress designs from nearly 200 other design bloggers over at Calling it Home, as they too burn the midnight oil to finish their spaces by November 16.