One Room Challenge: Meet Our Landing

A long, long time ago (okay…more like a year and a half ago) I attempted to participate in the One Room Challenge.  The challenge is simple, pick a room and make it over in six weeks, blogging and sharing your progress along the way.  So during the spring of 2014, I came out with hammers blazing, ready to makeover our old bedroom in six weeks but only made it to week two before I gave up.  Womp, womp, womp.  In my defense, 2014 was one of the most tumultuous years of my life with a crazy Etsy business, switching jobs, switching jobs again, trying to blog and finish remodeling our old house, switching jobs yet again this time to a dream job two states and 7+ hours away in Vermont and during the holidays.  Needless to say…we were busy.  So when I heard the One Room Challenge was back for its fall 2015 edition, I couldn’t resist taking it on with a vengeance.  I will crush your One Room Challenge!

Picking a space was hard.  We moved into our new, old Vermont country home (a circa 1781 home which you can take the full house tour here, take a tour of the grounds here, and check out the floor plan here) in June and have pretty much concentrated our makeover work on the exterior.  You know…take advantage of a short New England summer.  So pretty much every space in the new house needs a makeover.  I know we already have about 8 billion projects going on (a bathroom remodel, living room refresh, kitchen updates) but what’s one more project, right?  I thought about making the bathroom remodel my One Room Challenge space but given the space needs some electrical work, I (and our electrician) don’t need that kind of pressure.  And I really didn’t want to set myself up for failure.  So the space I chose?  Drum roll, please.  The landing.

So it’s not a room per se, although it is about the same size as the bedrooms in our old home, but I’m calling it a room so it counts.  The landing is at the top of the stairs where you’re greeted with an adorable little window that overlooks the backyard and a built-in bookcase that is still littered with the old homeowners’ books they left.  If you turn left, you head into a small room that we use as a dressing room.  It’s connected to our bedroom and since moving in we’ve stored most of our clothes in it like a major walk-in closet.

If you turn right, you head into another small bedroom that I eventually have plans to turn into a craft space.  Right now it’s full of boxes and random, homeless decor (hence my use of pre-move-in-day photos).

And if you do a bit of a 180, you can head back down the stairs to get that thing you were supposed to bring upstairs or you can head down the hall to the front of the house where the two more substantial-sized bedrooms are located.  It’s also the much sunnier side of the house.

The hallway also has this weird little jut out that is housing the chimney.  At first, I thought this was super awkward but now, I’m thinking of the tiny little desk nook that it creates.  It’s perfect sized for a little writing desk.

Natural segue into what my intentions are with your daughter in this space.  I don’t have it 100% figured out but here are the high points: give everything a fresh coat of paint, do not damage those gorgeous floorboards, create a mini home office space for me (Colby already has his work-from-home space downstairs and I’m essentially looking for a place to park the laptop and charge it), and carve out a little reading nook around the bookcase.  I’m thinking of bulking up the bookcase and adding a leather chair if I can find one in time.  Our book hoard is growing in a giant pile on the floor of the dining room so some storage space for them on the bookshelves would be a novel idea (see what I did there).  And with that, I will bid you adieu.  Check back weekly for a status report on how we’re doing with our One Room Challenge.