One Room Challenge - Week 1: Before Pics

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It's ORC time!

No, not the World of Warcraft kind...

It's the One Room Challenge! I've been a fan of the ORC for years. If you haven't heard of it, it's a biannual, online design event in which designers and guest participants are invited to transform a space over the course of six weeks. Who doesn't love a good before and after?

As a guest participant, I'll be posting my weekly progress while transforming one room in our home over the next month-and-a-half.

This is my first kick at the ORC can, and I've got a lot on my plate right now, with the 30-Day Spring Tidying Challenge also under way. What was I thinking???

So...I'm keeping it simple and working on a room where any change would constitute an improvement!

In this, the first of six weekly posts, I'll show you the room I'm going to be working on.

Just for fun, let's go wayyy back to what it looked like before we even owned the house.

Here's a quick 360° of the room taken during our walk through with the home inspector and real estate agent, before we signed on the dotted line:

Yes, that's a red power cord you see fastened around the door frame. Power outlets are scarce in century-old homes, and this was the previous inhabitants' utilitarian solution to plugging a TV on one wall into an outlet on the other.

Unfortunately, the above two pics were the only ones we took of the room before we moved in and started making changes.

While this room appears to be a family room at first glance, it's actually a bedroom. In fact, it's the largest bedroom in our home.

Before we bought the house, it was a duplex rental property. The tenants who lived upstairs used this bedroom as their common area. We've continued to use it as a family room/TV room.

One of the many luxuries of having a small family is the 'extra' living space. We occupy only two bedrooms: my husband and I in one, and our four-year-old in the other.

We often refer to the TV room as 'Charlie's room,' since it's where our fur baby spends most of his alone time.

He chills on the couch, looking wistfully out past the balcony onto the street---that is, until he spots another dog walk past and barks bloody murder!

As you've heard me lament before: there's still a lot of work that needs to be done on our house. So much so, that beautifying this room, on the second floor, out of sight (and scrutiny!) of guests, was low on our to-do list.

Once we'd painted over the bile-green walls and furnished it with a big, comfy couch and flat-screen, we turned our attention elsewhere.

We didn't even bother to figure out a book storage solution...

In the corner, you'll notice some horrible duct work we tried to hide behind a vintage grandfather clock, inherited from my husband's late grandmother. That's something I'm hoping to address over the next six weeks, God (errr...husband) willing.

So, that's where we were at before the One Room Challenge.

I know what you're thinking: how can you call yourself a decor blogger and allow a room that looks like that to exist in your home???

Well...since renovating our first floor, we've been living it up down there. We hardly venture up to this room on the second floor, except for our weekly movie night on the 'big screen.'

I'd like to change that.

After all, it's a great space with a lot of natural light via large, glass, sliding doors. I want for this to become a more usable, inviting area, where we can fam jam and hang out with guests.

Right now, visitors aren't even allowed up here...

neatntiny

decor • declutter • simplify