One Room Challenge | Week 1: Boy’s Bedroom Before

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the announcement a while back that I signed up for the Spring 2022 One Room Challenge. This is the 10th anniversary of the event, and I am so excited to be joining in as a guest participant and redoing my son’s bedroom!

What is the One Room Challenge?

Okay, cool. Right? But what is the One Room Challenge? Oh, I’m so glad you asked! It’s a biannual event – round one begins in April and round two begins in October – where 20 designers and influencers (per round) are selected to compete against one another to make over an entire room over the course of 8 weeks. The winner is featured by Apartment Therapy.

As I said above, I am a guest participant in this event. Guest participants get to join in, encourage, and inspire each other over the course of the eight weeks by uploading our own weekly progress to the One Room Challenge website. There are hundreds who participate, and I think this is going to be so fun to follow along with others and watch their rooms transform!

Backstory on my room choice

Over the next eight weeks, I will work toward making over my son’s bedroom. It currently looks like the random catch-all room that you have when you’re moving into a new place, but with a bed – and except we’ve lived here for almost seven years. It’s a hot mess.

After my daughter was born in September 2021, we moved her into my son’s room, my son into the room that had been my office, and the office to the second floor (kind of – it’s a mess, too). Before moving his bed into his new room, I installed new flooring, but didn’t replace the baseboards or anything. He now has a bed and a dresser, but there is still office stuff and other miscellaneous I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-this items sitting on the shelves. Poor room, I mean kid.

These photos are from before I installed the new flooring, but they’ll give you an idea of what I am working with. Take out the desk and jewelry armoire, add a bed, dresser, and 3,534 boy’s clothing and toy items, and you have a current picture. I can’t currently find my broom, either – BRB, going to check there.

My One Room Challenge Plan

I don’t have any major renovations planned for this room, but it definitely needs some updating. All of the work will be done by me, and there will be several large and small DIY projects sprinkled throughout!

• *The walls are painted paneling. I started to tear them out in a small area, but it turns out there’s a mess of wall behind them instead of just lathe and plaster, as I had expected. To avoid putting a ton of money (and even more time) into this project, I will leave the paneling up and use joint compound to make the walls smooth.
• *In the photos above, you’ll see a piece of trim on all the walls about 12″-14″ below the ceiling. I think it’s there because the paneling doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling. So I’ll probably put small pieces of thin plywood up there to fill in that space and use joint compound to smooth it all out. Cross your fingers with me that it works.
• The room will get new paint all the way around. The wall pictured in the first photo above will have the bed against it and will be used as an accent wall.
• I’m leaning toward a sliding barn door style door on the closet – I’d take opinions on that in the comments! That’ll be a fun DIY.
• I have a metal bed in one of my spare rooms that I’ll move into this room. It’s currently brown, but I’m going to paint it matte black.
• Several years ago, I painted the dresser that he currently uses white. It’s not aesthetically appealing as a dresser for a little boy’s bedroom, so I have a refinishing project to complete here as well.
• The ceiling fan is hideous, so I’ll be attacking it with a can of paint (or two).
• I didn’t save the baseboards from this room. They were too ornate for my taste and didn’t match the baseboards in the rest of the house. Our house has old, tall baseboards, so that’s what I plan to put in here instead.
• **I’d like to paint all the trim white. This trim is gorgeous close up, so I’m still on the fence about that. I don’t want to ruin it and regret it in the future.
• **I would like to build my boy a desk to go on the wall next to his closet. He’s currently only (almost) four, but I think it would be a fun space for him to draw, color, build Legos, etc. Then it’ll be functional when he gets into school in the next year.

*I realize that it would be best to tear out the paneling and put sheetrock up. I don’t want that added cost at this time, and I have leftover plywood from other projects that I can make work.

**These are wish-list projects, but I’m not sure they will get done over the course of this eight week challenge.

Boy’s Bedroom Mood Board

Stay Tuned for One Room Challenge Updates!

If you’re still reading – thank you! I hope you enjoy following along on this project with me! Make sure you sign up for my newsletter so you can be notified when a new post for the One Room Challenge is published!

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