WEEK 6 // ONE ROOM CHALLENGE: CALIFORNIA CASUAL LIVING ROOM

Originally, I had today marked on my calendar as "reveal day". But for this round of the bi-annual One Room Challenge, we were given an extra week to bring our room designs to life. I took full advantage of the extra time we were given and tried to space out finishing tasks on our California Casual Living Room so I wouldn't make myself completely nuts. Nothing like going into the holiday season with a newly finished room and my sanity still in tact. 

That's not to say that these past few weeks have been completely smooth sailing. I've had my share of delays, costly screw ups and frustrating projects. This is my 6th One Room Challenge Room and despite weeks of planning and prep, those disruptive bumps in the road still managed to sneak in. There were times when I wondered if this was finally the one that would do me under.

For today's update, I thought I'd share a few of the challenges I encountered as I redesigned our living room. 

Challenges

Windows |  Dressing our large wall of windows was one of the greatest challenges I encountered during this redesign - and I knew it would be. Those windows were one of the features that drew me in when touring the house before purchase, but they have given me a lot of grief over these 7 years. From afternoon sun that fades furniture and raises the temperature in the room to scale to the odd triangle shaped windows that sit at the top - how and just what to hang became my focus for many weeks. In the end, I settled on a solution of layered shades (solar underneath, woven roman on top) and drapes.

Scale |  The ratio of couch to available floor space in the room presented some challenges around what size rug to buy for this space. We have deep a sectional that takes up quite a bit of real estate in the room and choosing an appropriate (and available!) rug size gave me lots of headaches early on. Same with artwork - we went quite large with our final selections and even taped off sections of the vast white wall for visual planning and placement long before we placed our order. Still - there was still quite a bit of head scratching (and holes in the wall) when it came time to hang them.

One Costly Screw Up

I had to buy our woven window shades twice.

It was a big deal when I finally purchased these shades. I did a lot of research on whether to buy a custom or standard size, fretted over color and material selection and when I finally found the right ones and got them hung, I celebrated - for about 30 minutes until I ruined them ALL with a pair of scissors. 

In my defense, what I SAW were plastic tags (you know the kind that allow price tags to hang from clothes in the store) holding the pleating together for shipping on the face of each shade. What I failed to realize until it was too late was that they actually held mechanical ribbing together on the back of each shade. So when that plastic tag was cut from the front, it consequently rendered that ribbing useless and my shades fell flat to the floor and would no longer draw up. 

Bummer. I thought about trying to sew them back in place, but in the end - I went ahead and bit the bullet for a second purchase of the same blinds. 

So yeah, that sucked.

Alls Well That Ends Well

But now here we are and suddenly its install day - err... weekend. Over the next couple of days, I'll be fluffing, fussing, arranging, rearranging and photographing the room for the big reveal next Thursday. I'm impatient so its possible you may see some sneak peeks in my Insta Stories (@holtwoodhipster) over the coming days. Wish me luck as this challenge finally draws to a close!

In the meantime, there are a couple of hundred other designers with rooms in progress who can use some extra support over at Calling in Home. So hop on over for lots of inspiration! Lots of talent in this group.