One Room Challenge Week 1: Plan of Attack

A happy happy Thursday to you all! I am so excited to share that I’ve decided to participate as a guest in this fall’s One Room Challenge. The One Room Challenge is a biannual forum -April and October- for participants to have a fun and supportive way to share their room transformations over a six week period. This is my first time participating in the ORC and though I have some hesitation about that crunch timing, we have a room that must be done.

Catch up on my weekly progress here:

Week 2/ Week 3 / Week 4 / Week 5 / Week 6

The room we are tackling is our downstairs bathroom. This bathroom is off of our kitchen and our guest room which is actually the house’s true master though we don’t use it that way (we took over our entire second floor as our set of masters). What that means is that we have a bit of a challenge on our hands; how to pack all the style of a tradition powder room, because it’s off our kitchen, but also how to maintain some of the formality that people come to expect from a master bath.

Humor me here with these before photos. I had no idea I would ever need them for a blog post. But we’ve done mild work to this bathroom since moving in, just to make it livable but it still had some serious issues.

The major problem is that this room is at the center of our house and has no natural light at all. Hence the hazy yellow glow in all of the photos. We thought about how we could add light but we can’t add a window or skylight (center of the house and all). And we can’t add a door with frosted glass (it’s off the kitchen and nakedness and a kitchen doesn’t much mesh).  It also has the problem of a very small footprint. But this like I said, this bathroom is at the center of our home and the layout in our house is very efficient; there’s no where we can steal square footage from.

Another problem is that we hate the vinyl floors. It’s the bane of our existence. We have it in the kitchen though, I painted over it, and knew it just couldn’t stay if we were going to do this room over.

But the most pressing problem and the one that set us off down the renovation bath is the shower stall.  It’s waaaaay too tight, not just for a master but for any full grown adult to enjoy a shower. Oh you can take one, but you surely won’t enjoy it thanks to that bath fitter which eats into the shower area by at least three inches on each side. 

Here are some inspiration photos:

I recognize that these images have very little in common with each other except the bright, light and airy aspect of all of them but that is truly the goal.

So here’s where we’re going:

• Open up the shower space by removing the bath fitter
• Create illusion of light by keeping the room white
• All brass everythaaaang for the fixtures to warm up the icy white
• A little something special that involves my favorite Outkast lyric of all time
• Use open vanity to not weigh down the tight area

So that’s what I’ve got folks. I am crossing my fingers that this turns out well. I have been waiting quite some time to do this bathroom and I really want to get it right. Stop by next week for an update and to see if we are on track so far and what pitfalls we inevitably have.

XO PrepFord Wife