One Room Challenge Week Five: New Floors!

Hey everyone! It’s Week Five of the One Room Challenge! Can you believe how fast it has gone?

If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge, created by Linda of Calling it Home in 2011, is a biannual event in which 20 featured designers chosen by the One Room Challenge team each work to overhaul one room in 6 weeks. Along the way, the featured participants post updates each Wednesday detailing their process and updating readers on their progress.

In addition to the featured designers, anyone with a blog is free to take part as a guest participant and link their progress up to the One Room Challenge site every Thursday. That’s what I’ll be doing!

If you missed my previous updates, check them out here: Week One, Week Two, Week Three, Week Four.

And be sure to check out all of the other guest participants here!

Week 5 Progress

This week, the biggest progress was the floors. The floors in all of our bedrooms upstairs are made from pine, while the rest of the floors in the upstairs hallway and all of the downstairs are oak. Pine is a much softer wood than oak which makes it wear differently, and the bedroom floors are definitely worn! Splinters galore if you don’t have rugs down. Since we were making this room over anyway, we decided to get the floors done in there while it was empty.  We hired a local company, B&M Hardwood Flooring, who did all the floors in our old house. They are so nice, quick, conscientious, and just truly professional. We love them! It took two days this week, Tuesday and Wednesday, and they came out great!

Here are how the floors looked before they were redone. Faded, uneven stain, paint (only some from me) — just not good.

I forgot to snap a pic after they were sanded (all floors look so beautiful in that white, raw state, but anything you put on them turns them yellow! Case in point below.) Below, is how the floors looked with just wood conditioner (a must with a soft wood like pine, or else it will absorb the stain unevenly!).

Next up, a coat of stain. We went with Dark Walnut, which we had on the oak in our old house and loved it. It’s dark enough that it doesn’t show all the pet hair and dirt, but light enough that it doesn’t show all the pet hair and dust! It’s dark without being opaque — it almost reads as more of a mid-tone to me — the grain shows through beautifully and it’s really warm.

And, finally, after three coats of water-based poly.

SO happy with how they came out.

In addition to the floors, I also finished some small projects. I put the doors back up, hung a piece of art and the two balloon lights, built the track shelving, upholstered one side of the “tent”, put a back on the cube storage piece I’m using for the boy’s books (without one it was so rocky!), and played around with styling. Here are a few (mostly iphone) pictures if you’d like to see.

You can see the balloon lights in this photo. I love them! They are so much fun. And Graham was happy that I fulfilled his one request.

I’m happy with how this side of the tent came out. This was my second attempt (after I finished the first with a million staples and then had to take them all out and start over because I didn’t realize the side toward the wall was pulling really badly and leaving an exposed spot!). I will definitely write a full tutorial on how we did this after the ORC is over!

With the track shelving, I didn’t want it to look basic, even though it’s a simple and common shelving method. I started off with this design above…

…and settled on this one. I like that there is plenty of storage for toys but also some wall space for more fun art.

And that’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week (hopefully!!) with the full reveal!

Make sure to check out all the other guest participants here!