One Room Challenge Fall 2020 Week One- The Plan

Week one of the fall 2020 ORC is here! After watching my friends participate last fall and this past spring, I decided it was time to take the plunge. This is my first time entering and I am so very excited to be a guest participant.

For those of you who are new to the One Room Challenge aka “the ORC”, it’s presented by Better Homes and Gardens and was created to help friends encourage one another to complete a room in their home. This is a biannual event that features 20 designers who are working to create a finished space in just six weeks. I can’t wait to follow along with the featured designers and get to “meet” the other guest designers as well!!

While I will continue to work on the rental property renovations, I wanted to take this opportunity to give our own personal home some love. I will be posting weekly updates for the next 6 weeks to chronicle the progress of our project.

The Plan for the ORC

For this round of the ORC I will be making over our 1/2 bath located just off our entry way. Small enough to tackle along with everything else on our plate, and it will make a big impact in our day-to-day life. There are a number of things I would like to change about this room to make it a better fit for our family.

Functional Changes:

1. The vessel sink is too tall and makes it difficult for the kids to reach. This also results in more water splashing/mess to clean up.

2. The faucet height is wrong for the sink. This will be swapped out when completing the vanity makeover.

3. I’m pretty sure that this bathroom is not vented properly. The water will sometimes pool in the sink before bubbling downward. When there is no vent, air gets trapped in the pipe and has to bubble out before the water can flow through.

4. I’d like to look into adding a window in here for some natural light while we have things opened up for the venting.

5. The floors are freezing cold in the winter. FREEZING! This room sits over a crawl space and while there is a vent to it, it is like walking on ice once the ground temps drop. To remedy this we are going to add radiant in floor heating.

Fun Changes:

1. Tile
When we bought our house we had to do so many things just to make it livable and this room was put back together as affordably as possible. There was a leak beneath this floor so we had to rip it out then repair and insulate the pipes. Remember, it’s super cold in here! When it came time to make it a functional 1/2 bath again, this tile was free. A hard price to beat! While the current tile is not my favorite, its the grout that bothers me the most. It’s too low for the flooring and you can see the thinset in places. Because of this, no matter how clean the floors are, they still *look* dirty.

2. Lights!
If you’ve been following our rental house renovations you know that picking lighting out is one of my favorite things. I am excited to swap out this light for something a little brighter, and a lot more elegant.

3. Vanity
I want to take out this vanity and strip off the dark vanish to reveal a lighter color underneath. I then plan to have a local stone yard cut a piece of granite for us to use with a new, lower sink, and better fitting faucet.

4. Accent
I’m going to look into repurposing old wooden floors on the wall behind the mirror. I swapped out the mirror earlier this year and plan on keeping it in this space.

I’m looking forward to sharing our progress over the next few weeks. Keep an eye out for the big reveal mid-November.

Check out the updates!

Week 2

Week 3