One Room Challenge: Week One, The Guest Suite Turned Home Office Before

Are you ready for this? I’m not sure that I am. Once again, I’m participating in the One Room Challenge, the design challenge where a bunch of bloggers tackle making over a room on a pretty tight timeline. Luckily, this year they’re giving us two extra weeks because this “room” is actually a suite that includes a kitchenette and a bathroom. NBD. It also has walls in need of repair from our adventures in removing some intense wallpaper that was covering, quite literally, every surface, dirty white carpet, yellowing linoleum, and some lighting fixtures in desperate need of an update. Did I mention it still needs to function as our spare bedroom but is now a full-time home office as well?

That was the main catalyst behind my desire to push through and makeover the space. It went from a rarely used part of the house, where we occasionally housed some very understanding out of town guests and sometimes hid from the kids with a tub of ice cream; to a place that is now in near-constant daily use as we take turns using it as a home office space, a slightly quieter respite from our one year old and four year old who are both home with us full time. If you feel like your own background in Zoom meetings is less than ideal, imagine being someone who has written professionally about interiors for the past decade… and having this behind you.

In the images above, you can see where we started and in the slideshow below where we’re at today. We’ve removed all of that wallpaper and roughly patched the walls, but that’s as far as we’ve gotten in the past year, and we are more than ready to see it come together. I’m excited to transform that odd nook in the wall with a beam running through it into my dream niche, get a fresh coat of paint on the walls, create some functional storage, a little workspace and come up with a creative solution to the current flooring situation. We’re doing our best to keep shopping to a minimum, so I’m also going to be getting creative with items we already own to style the place out once the basics are in place.

Thanks for following along, check back next week for week two. 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.