One Room Challenge: Craft Room (Week 4)

This week has been very pivotal in the transformation of the room. Gone now are any traces of how it used to look, the major DIY jobs are completed, and I've started to introduce some of the new decor items to the room.

If you're just checking in here for the first time, you can catch up on the before pics here, the design plans for the room here, and the progress to date here.

When we left off last week, the paintwork had been roughed in, but still needed finishing off. To create a straight and line around the room, I set my laser level on a tripod and then applied low-tack masking tape along that line.

The trick to creating a neat line between two paint colours is to paint over the masking tape with the background colour first. That way, if there are any tiny gaps in the tape where the paint might leak through, the background paint will fill those.

Then, when you paint over it again with the contrast colour, there will hopefully be nowhere left for paint to leak through.

This method gives a really sharp line between the two paint colours.

With the paintwork finished, I was then able to start working on the contents of the room. That involved more painting, but painting furniture this time.

As I mentioned last week, I had gotten a water-based satin paint mixed in the same colour as the emulsion for the wall. As well as painting the skirting boards (base boards) with it, I used it to paint the old yellow cabinet that I had in the room.

The cabinet is the Hemnes linen cabinet from Ikea. It is a really lovely piece of furniture (now discontinued, I believe), but I had never intended it to remain yellow for so long! Finally, it's time for a change, and it's going green.

The difficulty with painting furniture is that it takes so long. There are so many fiddly bits that need to be dismantled, and then they take up so much space in the room. Currently, the doors and shelves are spread out all over the place! Once everything has been painted, it all needs to be flipped over to paint the other side. It's tedious, but I think this cabinet will look so much better afterwards.

Something I've been keeping to myself until now is the fact that I was away on holidays during Week 2 of the challenge! It was a bit crazy to take on this challenge knowing I'd be gone for part of it, but I got as much done as I could while I was away, and used the time abroad to keep an eye out for unique finds to add to the room. In Montenegro, I wandered into an antique shop down a little cobbled lane in the old town of Kotor and found this cute little cross stitch in a round frame.

I think it will make a lovely addition to my gallery wall of textile art.

In other news, I had a change of heart about the fabrics for the room. I felt that dark green would make the room look very heavy if I didn't give it a lift with a bright accent colour. I had originally found a colour scheme with coral accents, but eventually settled on a pink. The pink makes more sense in our house because one of the other rooms on the same floor is painted pink, so it feels more cohesive and consistent with the overall feel of our home. The fabrics seemed the most logical way to introduce another colour, and so I did some internet research and found a couple of pieces that I really love. The Roman blind fabric arrived yesterday, and I am smitten with it!

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I'm going to get cracking with making those Roman blinds over the next few days. Hopefully my other fabrics will arrive soon as that clock is ticking and the reveal isn't far away now!

Before then, I need to add more storage to the room. I already picked up this really handy Tomnäs storage unit in Ikea, and used the Branäs baskets to fill the cubbies.

Now I need to focus on creating an efficient workspace, which will be the major goal for the coming week.

Do pop back in next week to see how the room is progressing, and in the meantime enjoy browsing all the wonderful renovations happening over on the One Room Challenge site. You can also catch updates of my progress during the week in my Instagram stories.