The Interior DIYer
#DarkRomanticLuxe

One Room Challenge Spring 2022 – Week Five!

I will admit I don’t have a huge update for this week’s One Room Challenge. My MIL arrived from Ireland this week, so leading up to Week Five I got next to nothing done in our home office. A few things arrived that I had ordered online, so that was exciting! Here are a few of the things that came in …

I ordered a magnetic doorstop and holder from Lee Valley for the back of our bathroom door. Since our house is old and hasn’t been level of plumb in about 50 years, the door to our upstairs bathroom will flap open at a strange angle. Up until now I had been using a gift bag [full of nail polish] so keep the door wide open when it’s not in use. Instead of doom scrolling one evening I started looking into some alternatives to door stops and I came across magnetic doorstops and holders.

I installed the magnetic doorstop and holder up quite high toward the top of the door. This was so, a) no one destroyed their ankles when walking by it, and, b) I overthink things and I was terrified Zelda might unscrew the magnet and then eat it somehow. So I placed it way high up.

The other order that came in this week was our EKBACKEN white marble effect laminate countertops from IKEA:

I got the idea from Christine Dovey when she updated her son Malcom’s bedroom to include a desk, which she created by adding a countertop on top of two drawer units. Pretty amazing if you ask me. So we’ll be working off of a similar vibe in our office, except I’ll be reusing the legs off our old dining room table [painted black this time around] to aid in supporting the desk [along with hidden support along the walls]. I will of course detail that process as soon as I’m finished it [which I’m excited and nervous to start].

Because I didn’t get much ORC stuff done this week, I feel I should share what I did do to kind of prove that I was super busy?

THINGS I DID THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ORC:
– Painted the hallway
– Painted the main staircase
– Painted the skirting boards, doorframes, window frames and doors throughout the house
– Paint the kitchen
– Wet vacuum / deep clean the sofa
– Painted the 2nd hallway
– Moved all of Zelda’s furniture into Cora’s room
– Rearranged Cora’s room to accommodate both girls
– Set up Zelda’s room with a double bed and furniture for my MIL

As for the ORC, below is where I stand at Week Five, and as usual you can catch all the Guest Participant’s Week Five progress here!

ORC SPRING 2022 TO-DO LIST:
– Skim coat / patch ceiling
– Skim coat / patch walls
– Paint ceiling
– Paint walls
– Replace / upgrade banister at top of servants stairs
– Update and reinstall handrails
– Repaint stairs [not super necessary, but I might as well]
– Install desk system
– Update secondhand tufted office chair
– Source chandelier / remove the boob light
– Source storage cabinet[s] for office items
– Possibly source and hang curtains [not sure though for either window]
– Decorate / hang artwork / overkill the space

Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five
Week Six – Week Seven – Week Eight

DIY

One Room Challenge Spring 2022 – Week Three!

Week Three can be a fun week for many people undertaking the One Room Challenge. I say ‘fun’ in massive exaggerated italicized letters. It’s when little problems come sneaking out of the literal and figurative woodwork. Week Two lures you into a false sense of confidence. Week Three makes you question why you even decided to improve your home.

It wasn’t all bad though. I finally finished the ceiling! Considering the amount of work that went into updating the ceiling to make it look like a … ceiling … is very anti-climactic, but it’s finished!

The above photo is what the ceiling looked like when I was finished flattening [levelling? repairing?] the ceiling [you can see what I mean by flattening in my Week Two blog post].

I ended up doing three coats of paint and the ceiling looks miles better [below is showing only one coat]. I actually didn’t get the ceiling looking as perfect as I had wanted it to, but I could easily see myself spending all eight weeks of this just sanding small patches of ceiling and adding “just one more layer!” of pollyfilla. So I decided it’s an old house and has character, and accepted it’s little quirky bits. Because otherwise I would have driven myself insane.

I haven’t finished flattening [again, levelling? I’m unsure of the correct terminology here] all the walls in the office just yet [by using the same treatment as the ceiling, but I have finished repairing the tape on two walls, so I jumped in and started to paint.

PLOT TWIST: I bought the wrong paint finish. Welp. Don’t ask me why, but I bought eggshell finish paint instead of matte paint, so all the tiny imperfections I’ve been working so hard to hide are now essentially in 3D thanks to the eggshell finish. But all is not lost. I’m going to continue painting the room [as I bought 3.75L of eggshell paint] in two coats of paint, I’ll lightly sand the walls, wipe it down, then paint one coat of matte paint of the same colour on top [I’ll detail this further in next week’s blog post, as I will have hopefully finished the steps by then].

I’m not the only one running into difficulty when it comes to Week Three, as you can see by all the other Guest Participants here. It’s a good week to check out if you find you have some time to browse everyone’s progress as there are big changes across the board. I’m also slowly making my way through my to-do list. I’m hoping to have at least two more items crossed off my list by Week Four:

ORC SPRING 2022 TO-DO LIST:
– Skim coat / patch ceiling
– Skim coat / patch walls
– Paint ceiling
– Paint walls
– Replace / upgrade banister at top of servants stairs
– Update and reinstall handrails
– Repaint stairs [not super necessary, but I might as well]
– Install desk system
– Update secondhand tufted office chair
– Source chandelier / remove the boob light
– Source storage cabinet[s] for office items
– Possibly source and hang curtains [not sure though for either window]
– Decorate / hang artwork / overkill the space

Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five
Week Six – Week Seven – Week Eight

#DarkRomanticLuxe

One Room Challenge Spring 2022 – Week Two!

My first week of this season’s One Room Challenge was a tedious one and I feel like I didn’t get much done. But at the same time, I know once I get the tedious and incredibly boring stuff finished, things will fall into place quickly. As soon as I paint the ceiling and walls the room will feel 70% completed, so let’s get this week’s boring updates over with!

One tedious thing I fixed this week was the strange drywall “repair” under the ghost window in our home office …

I honestly think someone tried to repair a hole in the wall by mushing a piece of fabric into it and then painted over it roughly 40 times [seen above]. SPOILER ALERT: it didn’t work as well as they thought. Insert Chrissy Teigen disappointed gif here. It would move when I touched it, so I ripped it out. While I was giving this corner some special attention, I peeled away the taping someone had half-assedly put along the corners 60 years ago, then everyone who’s lived in this house since has ignored it instead of fixing it [seen below].

ALEX ENTERS THE CHAT. This is definitely a satisfying fixe. I started by removing the chonky repair work under the window but quickly realized it would be easier to just replace the entire panel under the window. Once I got in there, I found a giant [and I will stress a very old] wasps nest.

I carefully removed it, filled the gap with insulation and added a small piece of drywall. And taped and mudded it *properly*. I would like to thank the academy …

Speaking of mudding, in my Week One post I mentioned the tape throughout the room that no one bothered to mud. It was very difficult to photograph before, but now that I’ve been repairing it, it’s incredibly obvious [as seen above, the view from our bathroom looking toward the servants stairs. The office is to the left, and the bedrooms are to the right]. For some reason I am unable to comprehend, whomever drywalled this room put up tape, but never mudded it. And possibly added really thick tape? And then painted over it. It’s one of those things that didn’t photograph well, but IRL was soooo obvious. You could see tape lines every 12 inches across the ceiling and along all the walls. So that was the biggest challenge for me this week; just finishing evening out all that old thick tape.

How I did this was pretty simple on a small scale, but spread across a whole room was tedious. I bought a few tubs of LePage Polyfilla from Rona and with help from my palette and a few blocks of sandpaper, I got to work. I applied polyfilla to either side of the taping, and using my palette, scraped along either side of the tape, creating a flush continuation from the tape to the walls. That is super wordy, so I created this little image to hopefully better explain the process:

I’m quite proud of that little diagram as I think I managed to explain it quite well.

I am so close to being finished with filling and sanding the ceiling. I’m being very particular about it, but I’m really hoping to be finished by the weekend so I can get a coat of paint on the ceiling. I’m certain that once I get the ceiling finished, a huge part of the work will be over, because there honestly seems to be more ceiling than anything else in this room.

As for my to-do list, it looks like I’ve achieved nothing this past week, but I know next week will give me much more satisfaction when I cross like 4 things off my list.

ORC SPRING 2022 TO-DO LIST: (no change from last week … )
– Skim coat / patch ceiling
– Skim coat / patch walls
– Paint ceiling
– Paint walls
– Replace / upgrade banister at top of servants stairs
– Update and reinstall handrail [with prettier hardware?]
– Repaint stairs [not super necessary, but I might as well]
– Install desk system
– Update secondhand tufted office chair
– Source chandelier / remove the boob light
– Source storage cabinet[s] for office items
– Possibly source and hang curtains [not sure though for either window]
– Decorate / hang artwork / overkill the space

Be sure to check out all the Guest Participants here and view all the Week Two updates!

Week One – Week Two – Week Three – Week Four – Week Five
Week Six – Week Seven – Week Eight