One Room Challenge {Week 3} – Walls and Fireplaces

It’s no joke when she puts the word “challenge” in One Room Challenge. If you’re new to this challenge, Linda at Calling it Home challenges us to completely redesign a room in our homes in just six weeks. This is my fourth time participating. You’d think I would’ve learned from the first three rooms… but I dove back in anyway, knowing just how crazy it would be! This week we finally got started on the space, but it’s not coming along too quickly yet.

Just to remind you, this ^^ is what our fireplace looked like a few weeks ago. I just wasn’t feeling the tile.

When we did our bathroom demo a few weeks ago, we needed to rip off a bunch of the drywall around the fireplace, and we were already smashing tile – so we just went crazy and smashed up the fireplace too.

We redid the drywall, and added cement board to the fireplace. You are supposed to put it up when it’s going to be around heat, but whoever built the home last time never did it! We were happy to fix that little error!

The last step we got done was to tile the floor around the fireplace. We used the same tile as the floors in our bathroom, since the room are oddly open to one another.

Now that the tile is on place and grouted we are ready to brick the fireplace, and put our DIY Wooden Mantel back on – after I strip off the glossy finish of course!

The other step in the bedroom reno that we started was stripping the wallpaper, and painting the walls. I only wanted to take each end panel of wallpaper off so that we could paint in the corners. There would be nothing worse than painting and putting up new wallpaper, only to realize that you can still see the old colour in the corners!

I have to say, the wallpaper came up JUST as easily as it went on! Seriously, I just got an edge and pulled it up – it pulled in one solid piece all the way up the ceiling. NO effort. Hallelujah!

So I painted around my husband’s built-in closet, and into the closet.

And then I temporarily removed our barn door so that I could paint that wall too. The whole room is a beautiful crisp white now.

If you remember the design board from last week,  I also got all of my rugs, duvets, fans, and planters ordered! Everything is on it’s way!

If you’re wondering why we didn’t get more done… Remember I told you we were frantically trying to finish our Master Bathroom? Well we did it!

I shared a sneak peek on the blog last week, and this week I’ll finally be sharing all of the beautiful bathroom photos. Sign up here if you want to get all of the latest updates!

I’ve updated our 5 week to-do list so that you can keep up with our progress:

1. Paint walls
2. Strip old wallpaper
3. Put up new wallpaper
4. Buy rugs
5. Get new duvet
6. Get new fan
7. DIY some throw pillows
8. Strip and paint bedside tables
9. DIY new handles for bedside drawers
10. DIY artwork
11. Print photos for frames
12. Strip fireplace tile
13. Put up fireplace brick
14. Refinish fireplace mantel

Reading this, I’m realizing that we only have three more weeks to do EVERYTHING! I’m going to take a couple of days off to enjoy my beautiful new bathroom, and then I’m gonna get my butt in gear again! Wish me luck!

Click HERE to see more great One Room Challenge Participants!