One Room Challenge kickoff!

Me: "So we're going to need to refinish the dining room floors before November 18..."

The Fall 2021 One Room Challenge™ has kicked off, and I figured, what better way to get our dining room across the finish line than publicly commit to an arbitrary deadline to have it done?

I have always worked well on deadline. I get very, let's say, TAKEN with new ideas, shiny objects, groovy tunes, and then I go down a path I didn't expect and end up in another proverbial country. That's great when I'm trying to be creative and go with the flow but can be challenging when I am trying to put rooms of the house that I've "started" back together.

The dining room is one of those rooms!

What’s the One Room Challenge?

Twice a year, designers of all experience levels get together to cheer one another on in our quests to finish one room in eight weeks. It’s not a competition - just a way to build community among DIYers and professional designers alike. The challenge is all about peeling back the curtain and showing the process.

You can find other participants’ entries on the One Room Challenge™ website.

Back to the dining room.

Where it’s at now

We started last winter by making a couple of big changes.

The first big change to the dining room was removing the wallpaper. It was OLD. And there was wallpaper on the ceiling. And there were like three or four or more layers of wallpaper on the wall itself. To be honest, we didn’t do the prettiest job of this, but for now, our work is just fine - we like to hang tons of pictures anyway.

We used a water and vinegar solution and did our best to scrape carefully, but pocked the wall up pretty bad as we got super tired from the repetition and the endless layers of paper. The walls that were papered over just once or twice were fine. I am still learning about old house construction, and suspect the walls that had been papered several times were probably different than the ones where the paper came off easily. Those seemed to be solid underneath - paper, paper, plaster or other hard surface; whereas the heavily papered walls felt like paper, paper, paper, paper, paper, gypsum. Which is what we pocked up.

The ceiling was also papered!!! My original plan was to leave the paper on the ceiling, but it was all gummed up with the wallpaper, and when I pulled the wallpaper at the top, I ripped off a ton of the ceiling paper. Sooo. The ceiling paper came down too.

Lol clearly gonna have to do some reading on the wall differences, but here is a little carousel of the wallpaper removal highlights:

Then, we uncovered a cased opening between the entryway and the dining room. I really wish I had the foresight to take some video of this, but alas I had no tripod at the time. It was also really messy and I was swinging a legit sledgehammer so it was probably for the best my phone was nowhere nearby.

On the entry side the molding and trim was totally intact. That was an incredible surprise!! Instead of taking it off when they boarded up the opening, they drywalled around it. Thank you, whoever made that call.

On the dining room side, though, they did remove the molding, so we’ll have to add it back. Our house is around 100 years old, and recently used to be split into two apartments, so there are a lot of weird things like this that we’re uncovering as we go along. Lots of things done for speed or cost and not aesthetics or… logic.

Here’s the sledgehammering highlight reel:

We also primed + painted the room and replaced the outlet covers and switchplates - I’m going to cover those steps in separate posts so I can go into more detail on the choices and sourcing.

One Room Challenge plan: What we’re going to do

We have eight weeks to take the room from in-progress to complete. In that time the plan is...  

• Remove carpet

• Refinish floors

• Add molding/trim to other half of entryway

• Finish room top to bottom:

  • Find or create + install a lighting fixture

  • Find or create furniture and textiles

  • Finish the space (art, plants, decor, etc.)

So excited to get this room across the finish line and so happy to have a community of One Room Challengers to cheer along while we do it!