One Room Challenge Week Eight: The Petite Suite Grand Reveal

July 5, 2020 Kim Lucian

We’ve finally wrapped up the One Room Challenge and given our guest suite a total makeover in just over eight weeks. It wasn’t easy but I’m thrilled with the results!

The past couple of months have been intense for many reasons, and taking on a project like this was even more challenging than it might have been under other circumstances. When I first started to consider doing this round of the One Room Challenge, it was before Covid struck, and everything came grinding to a halt, and I had intended to give the kid’s shared room a needed refresh.

Once things shifted though the most neglected part of our home suddenly came into very high demand, as it became a full-time WFH office as my husband and I alternated between work and childcare, and our retreat in the evenings away from the chaos of kids and dishes and laundry. The only problem was the space was anything but relaxing. It was half-finished with walls in need of repair after removing some pretty intense wallpaper (imagine being inside of an elaborately wrapped Christmas gift- red and green with snowflakes on the ceiling, adorned with gold foil.) It was awkwardly laid out with outsized leftover furniture from our last place, mixed in with some hastily purchased Target essentials for last-minute guests, and it had become the dumping ground for off-season clothes, boxes destined for Goodwill… in short it was a mess.

So we took it on and straight away ran into a lot of issues we had not accounted for. This is the part of the story where I share with you my secret weapon in times like this, my husband. He was my equal partner in the whole way through, constructing the niches as I plastered walls, slogging through the linoleum removal job from hell, taking even my most ambitious ideas in stride. He’s an engineer which helps on the structurally sound side of things (I run nearly every DIY idea by him first) and has construction experience from when he was younger- which comes in very handy. We make a pretty good team.

So we pushed through the challenges and just kept at it. Working out ideas on scraps of paper over dinner. Coming up with creative solutions for items that we wouldn’t be able to order because of delays and forgoing anything that would require professional assistance. We couldn’t find a mini desk to fit the space that would ship before October, so we built one. We needed a wardrobe to match the existing one, so I combed through Facebook Marketplace. In the end, I’m so happy everything worked out the way it did because it all fits together beautifully. I’ve built a custom piece of furniture for every place I’ve lived since graduating college because I think that it’s the best way to maximize a small space and personalize it in one fell swoop, and each of those pieces has somehow found a home or been remade in the next space- here, we took apart the live edge bench I built for our former dining nook and created a bath caddy and the mirror’s vanity ledge from the slab.

In this space, we created not one but several custom pieces. We built a set of niches from an awkward nook in the wall with bench seats and floating shelves, we created a workspace from scratch that blends seamlessly into the adjacent kitchen, we created more storage by transforming two inexpensive Ikea wardrobes into built-in that spans the wall, and we even built the bed from plywood and a hardware kit c/o Floyd. I also created the wall to wall jute carpet by cutting a massive rug to size and binding the raw edges.

The other major DIY we tackled was painting and stenciling the exposed concrete floors to look like my favorite cement tiles, I was afraid the effect might be cheesy, but I’m utterly obsessed with the results. We also painted the kitchen cabinets with a setup that made things fairly painless, I created statement walls with a two-tone application of Portola Paint’s Roman Clay and for the rest of the walls and the ceiling brushed on lime wash to give them subtle texture and movement.

A few simpler DIY’s include the propagation wall (so I can clear my windowsills which are always covered in mason jars and plant cuttings), the Water Closet decal on the bathroom door, created with a Cricut and some gold foil, and my little towel ring hack involving a wall hook and a gold craft hoop. Thank god for quick and easy projects and the immediate gratification they provide, I definitely needed some little wins after devoting two straight weeks to just removing the linoleum.

Really, the space feels like one big win. We finally have a quiet little getaway to work, relax and just have a moment of sweet, sweet alone time and by utilizing the square footage so well I feel like we’ve gained more usuable space in the process. Thanks for following along and for all the love and support! You can view all the photos in the gallery below.

Resources:

Bedroom/Living:

Kitchen/Office:

Cabinet Paint Hague Blue and Schoolhouse White: Farrow and Ball | Petra Tile Allover Stencil: Royal Design Studio | Vintage Oil Painting: Elsie Green | Ceramic Footed Planter: Target | Glass Containers with Wood Lid: Target | Small Wood Vase: Melanie Abrantes Design| Electric Kettle: Amazon | Holders for Propagation Wall: Ikea, Glass Test Tubes: NovaTech

Bathroom:

Origional budget: $5,000 Final cost: <$6,000

Thanks for following along, you can find the rest of the posts in the series here. You can check out the rest of the guest participants here or the amazing featured designers here. You can also follow along on Instagram by following #oneroomchallenge for some serious eye candy.

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