One Room Challenge Fall 2021 Reveal (Week 8)

Woohoo! It’s the final week of the One Room Challenge! (With media partner Better Homes & Gardens.)

It’s been a switch for me to stay focused on one room for a set period and to actually get it done. A good switch, that is!

If you’re new here (and who isn’t? it’s a new blog) you can catch up on the previous weeks here:

• Week 1: The Plan
• Week 2: Demo Day
• Week 3: Framing
• Week 4: Installing the Fireplace Unit
• Week 5: Drywalling
• Week 6: Tile Time
• Week 7: Some Furniture Will Help

So now that you’re caught up, let’s jump into this final week.

Before & After

I love a good before and after, so here we go with the whole room shots to start things off. (Detail shots follow.)

Before

And After

You can see that I built a wood-burning fireplace completely from scratch, along with extending out the wall stub on that side of the room.

(I built a pantry on the other side of the new wall, so we are no longer storing food in the bedroom. Bonus!)

And here’s the view looking the other direction where I added furniture & decor as well:

Before

And After

We went from just-moved-in — with stuff dumped everywhere, 1980s metal mini-blinds, a broken curtain rod, etc — to a usable & comfy room!

Here’s a wide angle shot of the whole room, looking in from our kitchen.

Before

After

Detail Shots

Now for some detail shots, with a little bit of story time thrown in.

Quick Story Time About the Chair

Chairs were hard! First I ordered the Mod Orange Spice Armchair from Article. We both liked it, but then my husband decided he really wanted a recliner.

Have you seen most recliners? They are usually…ugly to say the least. We tried out a LOT of them, including the not-really-a-recliner Eames lounge. Which I have wanted for about 30 years, but could never even think about affording.

Eventually, we compromised on the Svago ZGR recliner. It has a massage feature that I love, and although it reminded me a little of a dentist’s chair it was at least not an ugly overstuffed thing. So it sat in our living room for a while, with me moving it around.

Then! While running to a different hardware store one day, I passed the holy grail: A Herman Miller outlet that I had no idea existed. I went in, and asked if they ever got any Eames lounges in.

“Every now and then,” they said. “We got one a few months ago. You can call every morning and see if one came in.”

So I called the next morning and…they had one! I left the house so fast I didn’t even comb my hair. It ended up being 55% off!

Yes, still a small fortune but…my grandma had recently left me some money. She loved fancy diamond cocktail rings, and always told me I should get one. So this is my diamond cocktail ring 🙂

The recliner now lives in my husband’s office instead.

Summing Up

It is SOOOO nice to have somewhere to sit back and relax after all this time. In front of a fire no less!

My order senses are a lot happier too. It was super stressful living with unfinished things everywhere I turned. (Most of the rest of our house still looks a lot like the before photos.)

This challenge was a TON of time-consuming work, but totally worth it! If you did the challenge too, how did it go for you?

Be sure to check out the reveals from the other One Room Challenge participants. I’m off to do that now too!