One Room Challenge Week 5
I feel like I spent SO MUCH TIME working on this room this week. And I also feel like it barely looks like anything is different. Adding trim molding is relatively quick work if you have done it before but everything else that goes with it takes so long! Just to recap where we have come so far:
We started with a dingy guest bedroom, and ripped out the carpet, baseboards + trim, and 70's mirrored bifold closet doors. I painted the room black! Yes, you read it, black! Last week, my fiancé helped me lay the new, GORGEOUS LVP flooring. It has felt like a slow go and I have put a ton of hours into this room already, but the room already feels so different! Check out Weeks 1-4 to see all the progress here! And also please make sure you check out all of the amazing transformations on the One Room Challenge blog! There is so much amazing stuff going on across the country and world with this event!
So this week, I wanted to get all of the trim installed, holes filled, caulked, and painted. I also wanted to add in the new lights and get the closet ready. Then the room would be done in the normal sense if I didn't have other stuff planned for it. But trim is really the final step in a room feeling complete before furnishings can go back in.
I have been replacing all of the window/door casings and baseboards as I renovate each room of my house. I have been going from the boring and ugly basic trim molding to a much taller/wider trim with straight lines as you can see in the image with 5.5" height for baseboards and 3.5" for windows and door casings. I love this profile as it goes so well with almost all design styles. My house is a mix of a cozy, transitional with a little coastal/cottage and a little contemporary. This trim profile goes super well with all of these styles. You can install new flooring while keeping your existing baseboard, but it would require you to add shoe molding which is not my favorite look so I replaced it all.
Before I started all of the trim, I wanted to make sure I insulated the room the best I could around the window and door. It didn't look like they ever put any spray foam around the window and I could feel cold air coming in (annoying that they didn't do this when the new windows were installed about 12 years ago) so I spray foamed around the window. I also wanted to do it around the door because I am trying to sound proof this room as much as humanly possible since Jeremy's office is the next room over. I wish I could fully insulate the walls between rooms but I'm not redo-ing drywall.
So I spent my Saturday cutting and installing all of my baseboards and casing. I can do this by myself, however, it is way easier, especially for the top and bottom boards over the window, to have help so Jeremy helped me hold my boards while I nailed everything. Trim used to be something I would never do. I for one hated lugging around my air compressor. But also... I could never get the gun on and off my air compressor. I also used to be nervous about measuring and cutting things correctly. That was all until I gave Jeremy the best birthday present I could have ever wanted last year (yes, I use his birthday present about 100 times more than he does, lol)! This Milwaukee M18 Cordless Brad Nailer is OMG.... freaking AMAZING. This isn't an affiliate link or an advertisement. This tool has just changed my renovation life. So many projects I used to never tackled unless Jeremy or my dad was there to help, I have full confidence to do on my own now!
While I finished the trim, Jeremy helped me add a couple of recessed lights. This room only had one fan/light to begin with which was not enough light for an office... especially an office with the walls painted black! In order to do this, he had to go up in the attic to run the electrical down to the new switch. He was ready to tackle all of the insulation up in the attic!!
As we were putting in the new lights, we realized that the original fan/light was slightly off center on the room. I am assuming this was done to attach the old fan to the closest joist for support since a fan is so heavy. Since I was replacing this with a much lighter pendant, I decided to move it to the middle of the room. While we were doing this, we saw the ceiling drywall was significantly sagging down in the middle... like we are talking 3/4"! Holy crap it was like they didn't put in any screws. So we added a ton of screws to pull the ceiling back up. So much for my freshly patched, skim coated, and painted ceilings! Look at all of those holes I had to re-patch and repaint! UGH! Really wish I would have figured this out before the ceiling painting stage.
My Sunday was filled with fixing the ceiling, filling all of the holes in the trim, and SO MUCH CAULK. I have a love/hate relationship with caulk. I really hate doing it, however, I am decent at it and caulk fixes pretty much everything. It is kinda like duct tape but for holes, cracks, and blemishes. It can make a mediocre job look great! So early Sunday morning, when Jeremy and the dogs were still sleeping, I spent the morning with my caulk gun, damp paper towels, and a bottomless cup of coffee.
Once everything was caulked 2x, holes filled and sanded 2x, it was time for painting. Yuck, I feel like I just spent so many hours painting a few weeks ago. But a lot of painting goes into making the room complete! So I painted the baseboards and trim. I decided on the window and door casing to be white and the baseboards to be black.
Since my walls were black, I wanted to swap out the outlets for black as well. This is something I have never done before even though I knew it was easy to do. I just always left it to my dad or Jeremy. So I had Jeremy show me so I could knock these out myself for this room and moving forward in the future. I was right... super easy! And they looked a lot better as black!
Lastly, I pulled everything out of the closet and painted this as well too. I was waiting on this because I really didn't have a place to put the stuff. But this had to get done so I could add my shelving and new clothes rod back in. This closet was going to double as sample storage for my office and as a coat closet for the extra coats we do not wear on a daily basis. So the clothes rod was moving toward the top and the cube shelving units would be on the floor!
I feel like a million hours went in to this room this week... seriously A MILLION. And I feel like it doesn't look all that different from last week. However, we have new lights - a closet ready for it's final storage - and the room looks totally like a room again with the finishing pieces put in! If this is all I was doing, it would be ready for furniture. But of course, I can't make things easy! That wouldn't be any fun. So stay tuned for next week when I work on my plank walls! EEEEEEK I'm so excited for this part! See you next week!
Happy designing and DIYing!
Katie
Check out the previous parts of this series:
Check out the other AMAZING transformations happening in the Spring '22 ORC: