One Room Challenge – Week Two (3 Room Update)
So week two (it’s only week two?!) of the One Room Challenge is now complete and we’re exhausted! Did we get everything done that was on the plan for this week? Yes! But was I able to document it all here for you guys the way I wanted – not a chance in hell! Turns out that writing blog posts and actually get tonnes of renovation/design work done at the same time is pretty hard. ( I can hear you my loyal IG friends, those “I told you so’s” are coming over loud and clear. Haha! My plan for this week was to give you a big juicy update on how we tackled Henry’s panelling in minute detail, but I’m going to have to write that another day as it’s currently 10pm on Sunday night and I’m writing this trying to get it up before the midnight deadline. I’ve mentioned I’m very deadline driven right??
For anyone who’s missed it – we’re taking on not one, not two, but three separate spaces for the One Room Challenge. You can find the general inspo post for the kid’s room here, and then Week 1 plan / concept / to-do lists posts for Henry’s Room (our 18 month old son), Aemelia’s Room (our 3 year old daughter), and our total kitchen renovation.
TO THE UPDATES…
PANELLING! The first mega update is getting to an 85% completion state with the custom panelling / trimwork in Henry’s room. The vision was a classic British design, that mimics the same simple trim squares that appears on our Tudor doors throughout the house, but also uses cove moulding to give it some extra dimension. Both the planning work and logistical installation of this process really challenged our math skills (saying a lot as we’re both math geeks). We have multiple challenges including 3 doors, an offset window, a random plumbing hole in the wall, unlevel floors and hidden radiators to contend with. I promise to write a meaty post all about how we tackled this, but I’m afraid that will come next week! This took us about two solid days of tandem work to get to this point – whew! We’re still waiting on the bullnose ledge that will sit on top of the panelling to arrive at our lumber yard, and then we’ll take this part of the room to completion so we can paint….
PRIMING! Secondly, put quite simply we managed to prime rooms – mainly Aemelia’s entirely too big for her, and way to many angles to be healthy, room and the kitchen. Seems insignificant but after weeks of stripping windows, radiator covers, baseboards, walls, patching and repairing all said spaces with the holes created by the electrician, and finally getting all the surfaces back to a manageable state through multiple rounds of sanding – priming felt like a big effing deal. I’ve still got Aemelia’s doors to prime, but that’s because I still want to take all 4 of them off and sand them down completely, to then paint with a sprayer instead. Ever since painting our kitchen cabinet doors with a decent sprayer… despite the fact they have yet to make it onto the cabinets…I’ve been pretty obsessed with planning out how to use the sprayer for every. single. Project.
PAINT PICKING! Thirdly, we decided on paint colours in both Aemelia and Henry’s rooms. While I’m one to get super excited about paint (did you see my paint sample bookcase?!), it’s not something that I expect everyone else to get excited about. Paint is personal, something that means and evokes an emotion to you individually, much like art, so you can’t expect someone else to fall in love with a colour that speaks to you. I do like to think I’m decent at picking paint colours, but I’m also a bit of a perfectionist so I find getting EXACTLY the right colour that I’ve been picturing in my head difficult sometimes. And their rooms were no exception…
This house (our 1929 Tudor revival outside of Philly), has been rather the anomaly when it comes to choosing paint colours. In most standard builder-grade houses, I can look at several swatches or stand in a room and tell you the direction it needs to go – but the sheer difference in light tone of this house has been perplexing to me. We’re battling swathes of original yellow paint in every room which casts quite the ever-reaching shadow, plus recessed windows everywhere which diffuse natural light. Then we’ve got a beautiful Japanese red maple on one of the house casting red/pink tones, evergreens on the other side of the house casting yellow/green tones, north facing rooms which have grey/blue tones (Aemelia’s) room, and either LOTS of natural light with big windows (Henry’s room), or barely any (the kitchen).
After testing the first few swatches of paint in our parlour, I determined we had to use natural pigmented paint, like that of Farrow and Ball. Most paints are made using synthetic colour and the difference in shading and tone is phenomenal – natural pigment gives paint so much depth, that the colour changes dynamically much like the colours in nature that are used to create it, and the colour never reads the same way from different angles. It means your room design feels that much more dramatic too.
So off I went testing Farrow and Ball colours everywhere. For Aemelia’s room, we originally planned on dark blue and a super light pastel pink – but every dark blue either read completely black, gray or totally washed out – and the pinks weren’t much better – either over saturated with colour or washing out and becoming gray. So I knew that I needed something with a lot more real colour and switched from navy blue to a seriously rich dark aubergine purple. Balancing with the chestnut stained wood all over her room as well as the bold design highlights we were going to introduce, the colour had to be warm, historic, and welcoming with no chance of turning gray in the strange North light.
I tested Farrow & Ball Pelt and immediately fell in love – right next to the wood, it looked GORGEOUS! So that part was actually easy after we’d veto’d blue.. The light pink part however didn’t happen so easily. I tested Calamine, Peignoir, Great White, and Middleton Pink from Farrow & Ball, but none of them worked. Calamine was too dusty and medicinal, Peignoir was too gray, Great White felt clinical, and Middleton Pink felt like we’d been dipped in candy floss. Ick! So I switched companies, to another UK group, albeit a lot smaller and family run – Fenwick & Tillbrook. They offer custom paint services, a lusciously thick paint that is a pleasure to paint with, and incredible customer service for such a small team! Their paints are again all natural pigment, but this time, their colour saturation seemed stronger and more vivid across lots of different samples I’ve tried (greens, putties, pinks).
Even so, I tested 6 different paints from Fenwick & Tillbrook – Tiny Dancer, Gypsum, Vintage Plaster, Smudgewand, Woodland Jay, Vintage Peony, and one other I clearly can’t remember the name of. A big variety in colour, but the first four were my real contenders. But as I painted them on the walls, they changed dramatically and And ultimately, I decided that a mix would be the best. After one quick convo with Fenwick & Tillbrook, we’re getting a 75% Tiny Dancer / 25% Gypsum custom mix sorted out that will be soft enough as a pastel, but with just the right peachy undertone to bring a colour pop to the room.
Henry’s room was pretty straightforward – we tested about 6 different colours, a variety of Farrow & Ball and Fenwick & Tillbrook, looking for a perfect soft putty that wasn’t too dark since the wallpaper will draw the light out of the room, and wasn’t too light as we wanted a cozy enveloping feel. F&B colours even despite the Southern sun in his room continued to wash out looking gray (we think perhaps the black recessed windows are at play here?!). So we have opted for Fenwicl & Tillbrook’s Collared Dove which is such a simple, but beautiful putty beige.
So that’s about all the updates for now. If you’ve read this without all the pretty pics, then well done you. Sorry but pics take ages and I’m shattered tonight!! (will be updated with pics on Monday) As for next week, we’ll have some mega updates next week for anyone who’s been watching our stories – the new kitchen floor, complete with DIY radiant heating!!! We’ll break that down step by step as well as provide some updates about other bits in the works. So stay tuned, and keep your eyes peeled to Instagram stories for more behind the scenes updates and fun.
Love & cuddles,
Lex
IMPORTANT LINKS:
One Room Challenge sponsored by Better Homes and Gardens.
Featured Designers for April 2020:
A Glass of Bovino | Beginning in the Middle | Beth Diana Smith | Clark + Aldine | Coco & Jack
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