One Room Challenge Archives - Page 5 of 7

Budget Home Theater – Things are never simple {ORC Fall 2018: Week 2}

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 – The Reveal!

If you’ve landed here from the One Room Challenge, Welcome! We’ve just purchased an 80’s contemporary home in Upstate NY that just needs a little TLC to bring her back to her former glory.

Alternate title: What to do when you’ve got that exposed brick loft look but fear for the stability of your home.

So please recall this makeover really started with this fun little burst pipe in the exposed ceiling of the basement a few days ago, which we burst ourselves trying to plunge and applying too much pressure to a slow kitchen drain and drano was not doing the trick, that made a general mess of this corner of our basement.

We *thought* we had a couch coming this past weekend (we’ve been scouring craigslist for months) and finally found another couch online that has good reviews and the price was comparable to what we were seeing in our area for used couches. More on the couch later, but during one fitful night of sleep this past week, I decided I wanted to paint two of the walls dark, preferably before the couch arrived. So I ran out to Lowes and grabbed a bucket of waterproofing masonry paint that was tintable. I picked a medium – dark blueish gray (Edit: Sweeping Rock Storm Cloud from Sherwin Williams) in record time. Normally I would hem and haw and grab test colors and sit on it for weeks but like I said, it was Friday night and we thought we had a couch coming on Monday.

Snowball: increase rapidly in size, intensity, or importance

Picking up waterproofing paint was merely precautionary and just seemed like the smart thing to do. We definitely have a damp basement but luckily between two sump pumps and with dehumidifiers running, its very comfortable. But it is clear the previous owners have repainted random areas of the walls. Probably to hide issues! While my paint was getting tinted I started reading the back of the can and quickly realized this was more like an epoxy application that in order to do it right, involves scraping all of the old paint off and applying muriatic acid so as to not void the warranty. Guys, this was not happening on a Friday night. We recently expoxy-ed our garage and that was a 4 day ordeal.

So we did the next best thing and agreed to scrap off anything that was loose, but skip the acid wash. WHICH TURNED INTO THIS.

Scraping honestly wasn’t awful (we did run and get masks early on into scraping). Attempting to vacuum it up (clearly we did not anticipate this and had not put down drop clothes) will probably kill us 20 years from now.

Our shop vac created a cozy little haze of dust particles which in turn coated everything in the room that we had not moved out. Needless to say, the kids ARE NOT allowed down here for a while. (Safety disclaimers: this house was built and added onto in the late 80s, so we aren’t super concerned with lead paint or asbestos, but old mold is a bit concerning – I would NOT recommend dealing with this issues yourself without professional help, we just found ourselves in a mess we had to get out of quickly in the middle of the night.)

We did find some horizontal gaps, which, per the internet, if they are bigger than the size of a dime, should be concerning, for, you know, stability of the house and water seepage. Ours were not that bad, and luckily there is no bowing out of the walls but we did add mortar on Saturday to fill in the gaps. The walls are certainly texturized at this point, but I’m pretty sure that’s a thing now so I’m embracing it? Guys, I really just didn’t care at this point. I am ready to put this room back together.

Generally clean up would come next, but our handy man really likes to find other jobs to do for us, so Monday he offered to install our new recessed lighting after fixing the broken pvc pipe and to take down the old random florescent lighting. Switching out lighting is one thing, running new wires is another, so Tom was happy to hand over this job to him as well. He is not one to clean up after himself (his price and general handywork is right so we accept these inadequacies) so now I’ve got wood chips all over the floor from where the new wiring had to go. But on the plus side – I LOVE THIS COLOR.

So now we’ve got paint on the scrapped walls. I need to paint the other walls white, which are all in much better condition, and I need to pick a trim color (I’m thinking just shades darker than the dark walls). We’ve got to clean up the rug and wipe down everything we didn’t take out of the room. We will start moving stuff back into place and I’ve got to brainstorm an idea for the halved table that has seen better days that we are using as counter along the side wall. Suggestions welcome!

Now go check out the Featured Participants and fellow Guest Participants! See you next week!

October 11, 2018/0 Comments/by Kayla

80s Contemporary, Decor and DIY, One Room Challenge

Budget Home Theater – The Reasoning {ORC Fall 2018: Week 1}

Week 1 Week 2 Week 3 Week 4 Week 5 Week 6 – The Reveal!

If you’ve landed here from the One Room Challenge, Welcome! We’ve just purchased an 80’s contemporary home in Upstate NY that just needs a little TLC to bring her back to her former glory.

So we’ve been living in our new home in Upstate NY for about two months now. This house is admittedly, crazy big. We really didn’t need this big of a house, but dammit did the aesthetic and location and yard and price call to us. It has turned out to be a BIT more of a fixer upper than originally anticipated, but that’s ok. Every time a new problem pops up, we find ourselves groaning for a minute, and then enjoying digging in and trying to fix the problem ourselves. We’ve gotten braver over the years and have had pretty good luck so far. Cue the angels singing harmoniously. I’m living my dream, man.

So clearly an attempt to troubleshoot a slow drain in a kitchen sink last week would snowball into creating a budget basement home theater right? I’m sorry, do you not see the obvious thought process on this one? Let me explain.

As previously mentioned, this house is quite a bit bigger than our last house. This is not often a complaint you hear from home owners. And I’m not complaining, but I do want to find ways to creatively use these spaces. Once you’ve ticked off the obvious bedroom, tv room, play room, etc. areas that a family with two young kids wants, you start to get creative with the rest. Enter the Budget Home Movie Theater on the side of our semi-finished basement. We technically bought a screen and projector and used our old SONOS system a month ago and set it up some pillows and folding chairs and that was it. But after an attempt to unclog and plunge a slow drain in our kitchen, which in turn caused us to burst a pipe in our basement in front of the screen, which caused a disgusting amount of stinky water to spill onto the carpet, and splatter on the poorly painted walls I thought to myself, hey, didn’t the One Room Challenge start this week? Maybe this is my chance to get back into blogging after a 2 year hiatus and albeit sporadic posting schedule previous to that.

Still with me? So let’s talk about the plan and why we are calling this a budget makeover. It’s less about the ability to spend and more about the practicality of spending too much on this space.

Reason #1 – I have serious PTSD regarding water in houses (stories I’ll eventually blog about). Even though this basement is already semi-finished (distinct rooms from additions built in the 80s, wall to wall carpeting in certain areas) I will NEVER trust putting up any new drywall in a basement. I’ve been burned too many times. I don’t even get upset anymore when I see water coming in through a ceiling or wall. However, accepting home ownership woes and being a masochist are two different things. What I’m trying to say is we’ve decided to visually split the usage of this room with paint and furniture, versus adding a wall to make it distinct and separate from the typical rec-room area stuff.

Reason #2 – My kids destroy everything. This is of course a slight exaggeration, but I do not have it in me to spend thousands of dollars on a nice leather sectional while they are 2 and 4. We started a having family movie night a few months back (in NJ) and they are allowed to eat popcorn on the couch on Friday nights. Greasy, buttery popcorn. It’s October, so I can’t help but hand them little Halloween treat bags of M&Ms too. Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a complete ice queen. So we are searching for second hand or cheaper (and probably not exactly pretty) new couches for this area. The ceiling is too low to do traditional movie theater stadium seating, though we did consider building a platform and nixed it. A sectional with a few reclining seats or a sleeper sofa (sleepovers in a few years!) is the goal.

Reason #3 – It just doesn’t seem necessary to go full fledged makeover. Is anyone else exhausted in reading about online/seeing IG photos of/watching TV shows about gut renovation jobs? I love me a good before and after, and yeah, we did that in our last house. A lot. This house doesn’t NEED any of that right now. And I’m happy to call myself a slow decorator (much to Tom’s dismay). So now that we are doing this ORC, we will probably pull together a few more things than what I would have normally done, but I can also appreciate calling a spot in our house complete.

The plan:

Clean, paint, buy seating, update the lighting, hang curtains, think of a plan for our halved table (more on that later), create a snack area, agree on movie posters to hang because why not. Maybe pretty up the rec room side of basement too, I don’t know, I don’t know if we’ll have time.

And of course, thank you to Linda and the team at One Room Challenge for continuing to host such a fun group experiment. As always, the Featured Designers will link up on Wednesdays, and Guest Participants will link up on Thursday through November 8th!

(Also, if you noticed and are wondering, you are not crazy. This Week 1 post is not linked up to the Week 1 Guest page because, yeah, I’m jumping in at Week 2 and missed that boat. Please accept me for who I am as a blogger.)

October 11, 2018/0 Comments/by Kayla

50s Colonial, One Room Challenge

ORC: The Big Boy Room – The Reveal! {ORC Spring 2016: Week 6}

You might be asking yourself “Wait, what happened to Week 5’s post?”

And if you’ve been following along on this challenge (or noticed my instagram feed to the right), you might have also guessed this happened:

Yup, Theodore Raiden decided to join us on May 1st, when I was just a day short of 36 weeks. Good thing we transitioned William into his big boy bed literally a week before, when the wallpaper was up, but the finishing touches were not quite there. Lots of big changes in a very short time period for this little big brother, but I am happy to report he has taken it all in stride. I’m really regretting not doing a baby birthday pool sooner.

But enough about babies, onto the big boy room!

Yes, that is a pillow with a picture of Tom and I getting ready to sky dive. Seems fitting in the room.

William really digs his airplane bed. We picked it out without any input from him, so we are glad he likes it. He did fall/roll out of it pretty much every night for the first week, but since then he has been staying in it at night. Luckily, we found a really plush shag rug (my nod to the original decor) that softens the fall, so we didn’t even know he was falling out until we would check the monitor and realize we couldn’t see him. I’ve slowly been taking the extra pillows that were stacked around the bed away as he seems more and more comfortable. His instinct is to go straight to the corner when we say its time to get into bed, which is why there are still a few blankets and pillows to the left, but he eventually crawls into bed as we sing songs or read.

I especially like the toy box on the front of the bed. We added two hinges so the top doesn’t have to come all the way off. There isn’t room for much else in here, so it’s nice to have a place to toss the handful of toys that get dragged up here in the course of the day. We are still lacking in book storage – I’m on the search for a small magazine rack or basket.

The rocket canopy was not my idea. (Something like this was actually my original idea for the corner, but, you know, time and energy.) I still think the store bought version is a little too big for the room, but, I was outnumbered by Dad and William 2:1 (I should get use to this feeling I guess). We hung it from a stud, so its a few inches farther from the corner than I would have liked in an effort to minimize how huge it looks, but it is damn cute, and best of all, *hopefully* safe in case a kid decides to try to climb it or something.

We weren’t planning on bringing the glider from the nursery into this room. And it wasn’t in here the first week. However, while we were in the hospital, the grandparents were really having trouble getting William to bed, and suggested we move it back in. Sitting in this glider and reading before bed is a huge part of his bedtime routine, and it seemed like there were enough changes going on and we could concede on this small aspect to make his bedtime smoother. It has already made a world of difference. The baby is in the crib in our room for the next 8 – 10 weeks or so, so nothing is in the nursery right now. Hopefully we will be able to move it back when Theodore gets transitioned into his room.

I’m still looking for just the right diaper organizers for the closet. The pocket hanger we bought from Amazon is a touch too small. We have made good use out of a few simple hooks for clothes, hats, and the wet diaper bag for now though. The clip on light has really helped with making diaper changes more efficient as well. It helps when you can see what you are trying to clean. Go figure.

The shelving between the windows were borrowed from other rooms in the house, so they are legit vintage brass brackets. The wood tones match the hand-me-down dressers perfectly. The olive green blackout curtains are velvet and match the rug which was a completely happy accident. I wish they were a little bit longer (I cringe at too-short curtains) but they only came in one size. Eventually I have great plans add a strip of fabric (I’m thinking something black and white with a small pattern) to the bottom so they look longer. For now, I’m telling myself it’s a good thing the heavy fabric ends right at the radiators, so the heat isn’t completely trapped behind the curtains this coming winter.