A Very Unglamorous Update: One Room Challenge, Week 2

Hi all!

We're now in the second week of the Fall 2020 One Room Challenge, and I truly wish I could give a glamorous update - however, that's just not reality. What we've mainly done this week is the "before" work to get us to the shiny "after," where all of it comes together.

Here's a breakdown of what we've accomplished this week:

Cabinet Prep

We did a few different things to prepare for painting our cabinets this week. We made a trip to the nearest Home Depot and bought supplies, including samples of paint to help us decide on our perfect shade of blue for the lower cabinets. After narrowing it down to three, we took it to a vote on Instagram. It was much more split than we expected! It was pretty much neck-and-neck, but one darker blue pulled away at the end and came home with the win. Ultimately, however, we tested all three colors on our cabinets, and in the light the winning color pulled very purple - so we made a decision on PPG's Blue Fjord, which is very similar to the other color but was more of a true blue in natural light.

For the white, our main concern was that it would pull yellow or blue or green, so we ended up selecting Behr's Ultra Pure White. It's the base for all of their other colors and is a really stark white without any undertones.

After that decision was made, it was time for the work to begin. We took off all of our kitchen cupboard doors and sanded them with an orbital sander with 80 grit paper. We're also planning on changing out all of the hardware in the kitchen (which I'll talk about a little more in the next section!) so we made our own wood filler with wood glue and sawdust and filled in the holes left by the old knobs. This upcoming week, we'll prime, sand, and (hopefully) start painting! I'm so excited to see our kitchen start to transform.

Ordering

(AKA online shopping, my favorite activity)

The other main thing we did this week was a whole lot of online ordering. This part always hurts a little bit in the wallet department, but it's also super fun getting presents (from us, to us) in the mail - so we could get past it. Here are some of the things we ordered!

• Faucet: We wanted a sleek gold faucet to replace our current one. Our main gripe with the one we have now is that it has a separate sprayer instead of a pull-down nozzle, so we ended up purchasing the Delta Lenta faucet in Champagne Bronze. It had great reviews, a pull-down nozzle, and (in our opinion) is beautiful as well. It's honestly a little embarrassing the amount of times I've thought about this faucet this week - I can't wait to see it installed!

• Knobs & Pulls: Like I mentioned previously, we're replacing all of our old kitchen knobs with brass ones. We wanted something sleek, but still relatively traditional - and ultimately landed on the Amerock Appoint collection. They're a nice gold without being too showy, and we thought they would go really well with the blue and white cabinets.

• Chandelier: My breakfast nook chandelier and I ran off to Vegas and got married this week (or, more accurately, I finally got to order it!) We found a great price for it (only $150!) on Build.com.

• Bistro Chairs: We waffled between a couple different bistro chair options for the breakfast nook, and ultimately landed on the Safavieh Salcha bistro chairs in White/Grey (which, believe it or not, is completely different from the ones in Grey/White.) Though I have a serious obsession with bistro chairs with arms, we decided with the space we have that it would be more practical to go for chairs without arms so they can be more easily pushed under the table. Which, speaking of....

• Round Table: I made my first ever Facebook Marketplace purchase this weekend and scored a round 42" table for just $30. It needs a little TLC and a coat of paint, but I absolutely love it - it's exactly what I'd envisioned and it even has little gold feet on the bottom that I think make it look more high-end. It'll be perfect for the breakfast nook corner!

An Overly Ambitious Trim Scheme

Barkley and I are truly dangerous when we get started on a project like this. We start with a nice, manageable list, then someone (usually me) says "Wouldn't it be cool if we also did so-and-so?" Then the other (usually Barkley) gets equally excited about the idea, and our list starts expanding. In this case, the off-list idea was dressing up the space with moulding. As mentioned in last week's post, we're going for a Parisian contemporary look in the room. The thing that's always appealed to me about that style is the attention to understated, but sophisticated detail. All of those rooms have such beautiful moulding that they have the wow factor whether there's furniture in there or not.

Credit: A + B Kasha

I was looking at the windows in our breakfast nook, and thought they needed a little something extra - so we made the decision to add trim to frame them, as well as installing curtains to make them look larger than they are. That would have been enough already, but Barkley looked at the outside of our island and had the idea to add moulding to that as well to make it look like more of a custom piece and tie it into the Parisian style of the rest of the room. That's a project we'll do in a few weeks - but we're hopeful it'll be the element that really elevates the design to the next level.

That's pretty much it! I have a few days off next week, so I'm going to try to make a lot of progress on painting, both the cabinets and the round table. See you then!

Much love,

Claire