One Room Challenge Week 8
This bedroom is finally ready for her reveal! There has been blood, sweat and tears getting to the finish line. This last ORC post will get into the challenges we faced pulling off this bedroom as it’s easy to just see the quick highlights on social media. Before we get started here are the various iterations of our bedroom over the years. We've always just had a bed, nightstands, lamps and a rug. The first iteration was in our original house before we renovated. We did love our walnut bedroom suite but it was just a queen. The second iteration was the same furniture in a much brighter, larger space. The third was after we got the king mattress. None of them have been really awful but they were just really plain. This ORC has been our chance to finally complete the room and make it special.
Here is the breakdown of our biggest hurdles and what we've learned.
1. Fine finishing a piece of furniture is tricky! We are not carpenters or wood workers and while we got a really great stain match on the bed to the teak nightstands we shouldn’t have stained the lumber before we assembled the bed. There were issues getting the 45 degree cuts perfect and it required some re-sanding and re-staining after the bed was assembled.
2. Getting a professional finish on the drywall mudding and taping is harder than it looks. We were in a bit of a rush and we skipped the final pass of sanding and mudding. We were lucky that we could adjust the headboard height on the wall and cover it up.
3. When installing new light fixtures - measure the lights! The new electrical boxes that we needed to mount directly to the drywall in order to mount the wall sconces needed a last minute fix. We needed a cover plate to mount between the wall and the light fixture. The new boxes came to five inches while the backplate of the sconce was only four.
4. Double check all your measurements! We accidentally drilled a hole for the artwork in the wrong spot. This one was an easy fix - we caught it before the wall plug went in so we were able to spackle the hole and it’s a quick paint touch up.
Overall the biggest lesson I think I learned is not to rush. The timeline at times made us feel like we had to hurry and that’s when we either made mistakes or felt stressed. For anyone doing this challenge in the future - I would recommend starting your most complicated tasks first and add more time than you think you’ll need. This is especially true if you are tackling things you’ve never done before. We’d never built a bed and never re-wired electrical to accommodate wall mounted lights. Both of these took much longer than we anticipated.
It never gets old seeing a mood board come to life but I’m surprised by how much the headboard and the artwork make the room. They both are what the room was missing. The headboard adds a softness and quietness to the room and the artwork really just is the show stopper.
