WEEK ONE: FALL ONE ROOM CHALLENGE

I have officially been bitten by The One Room Challenge after taking my first shot at this collaborative endeavor last spring. This time around, I will tackle my daughter’s room, and it’s honestly the last room in our home to update without doing a gut renovation. So once it’s finished, it’ll feel like my next round of work is all heavy lifting from here on out.

I have been designing my daughter’s room since she was born, and each makeover has been in publications like LONNY, HGTV, IKEA, and more. And now that my daughter is officially entering her tween years, her design aspirations need to be within budget and my eight-week timeline, which will be tough for someone like her who likes to hold onto everything and just keep squeezing in more new stuff.

The vision for my daughter’s room is two-fold. The room should be a creative hub for all her aspirations, and be hyper-organized. In addition, there are three obstacles I need to address in her room.

The current footprint of her room doesn’t work. She has a lot of furniture pieces that we moved from our old apartment into our new home, and they’re oversized in the space due to a wall radiator and two closet doors that swing open into the room. To fix this, I want to remove a dresser from the room, swap out her full-size bed for a daybed, and scale down the size of her desk.

My daughter's overhead ceiling, similar to my son’s room, has a lot of cracks and uneven marks since we live in a home built in the late 1930s. I need to repair the ceiling and, if my budget allows—wallpaper it. Something needs to go up there to add a visual element of surprise.

The biggest thing to address is storage options everywhere in the room. Since the room has the luxury of two closets, I want to maximize the floor space by maximizing the interiors of these reach-in closets. I also want to find organization for jewelry, hair accessories, and desk supplies so everything has a home when she’s done with it.

I’ll have plenty more to share as the weeks go on and input and videos from my daughter and me tackling this room together this fall. I’m excited for you to join me again for another One Room Challenge. And I may need a lot more coffee this time to manage my tween partner.