One Room Challenge: Shared Girls' Room (week 1)

It’s the first week of October, which means it is time for the One Room Challenge. For the non-design nerds among you, twice a year, Linda from Calling It Home invites 20 bloggers to fix up one room in six weeks. Home viewers with a penchant for crazy can play along as guest participants. Last year, I took a small, weird side closet in our new house from weird side closet to family room in (a little more than) six weeks.

Before. Obviously.

Six plus weeks later...

One year later, my very first ORC masterpiece is now serving as a temporary master bedroom. With no door.

One year later, our little 2 bedroom, 1 bath bungalow is home to one set of parents, one set of six-year-old twins, two teenagers, and a 90 pound dog. Life happens, people. And you make it work.

I had big plans to participate in the One Room Challenge this fall. The girls’ room, a.k.a. The Lego Palace, needs work. A lot of work. Shelving would be a good start. Some non-IKEA furniture. Art and a rug. A consistent color scheme that doesn’t look like the skittle factory threw up all over would be nice. But as it turns out, this time around, we can’t fix our home space problems without a remodel. We actually do need more than one bathroom and the whole no door 8’ x 15’ master suite is probably going to get old pretty quickly. Yep. It’s remodel time and it’s starting now.

So, after a lot of deliberation and more sleepless nights than I care to admit (this is possibly related to the lack of proper air conditioning in my temporary bedroom rather than the stress of this somewhat inconsequential decision), I decided a few weeks ago not to participate in this fall’s One Room Challenge. Last year, I was trying to do homework and starting a girl scout troop and remodeling our only bathroom and doing all the things. This year, who needs that kind of stress and crazy?

Apparently I do. I remembered something over the weekend that has been gnawing at me all week.  While last fall's ORC was in process and the walls were coming down in my bathroom and four of us were trying to adjust to our very quick move to Texas, I attended a blogger conference in Portland. I left inspired to do all the things partly because of the keynote address by Tiffany Han. What did it for me was when she said, “If you think, ‘Is that crazy?’, then yes. Do it.”

I’ve done a lot of crazy things since last October. What’s the worst that can happen? And what is six weeks in the grand scheme of things? It’s nothing, really. In fact, in the last six weeks, I’ve put together a plan for a traditional living room for a fictional client with a crush on Marie Antoinette. If I can put together a successful traditional living room in Louis XVI style (jury is still out of the “successful” part – I’ll keep you posted after I present the project next week), then surely I can put together a shared girls’ bedroom, right? Nothing like a last minute decision to jump in with both feet. Want to see the before?

Full disclosure: these photos were taken a few weeks ago when this room was clean. Obviously, if I took a photo today, you would see Legos and Build-A-Bear clothes all over the floor and the partially put away laundry and the shoes and all the books. So many books. Use your imagination. You know how it looks. 

So here we go. Girls’ bedroom for a teen and a grade schooler coming right up. In the meantime, check out what everyone else is planning over on Calling It Home. There's some good stuff in there.