We finally are getting things done on my daughter, Tabitha’s, room!  When my contractor put me off a week and wasn’t going to show up until five weeks into the six week One Room Challenge, I was a little panicked.  But he showed up this week.  He’s done day one of his two day job to totally enclose Tabitha’s plant ledge.  The plant ledge looked like this before we bought the house:

The (gigantic) plant ledge that we enclosed with a half-wall and added a door to Tabitha’s Bedroom.

We had the builder enclose it, but they talked me into just putting a half-wall instead of a full-height wall.

This is how the plant ledge looked last night before the contractor started work. I had painted the bottom half of the space with black chalkboard paint.

When my husband and I are in the downstairs Family Room watching TV and Tabitha’s in her plant ledge, she can hear our shows and it’s distracting if she’s doing homework.  Likewise, when she’s upstairs with her friends, we can hear just about everything they talk about – which can be very informative 🙂  But we decided that walling it up entirely is the best option.  Here’s what it looks like after the contractor worked one day:

View of progress from Foyer side.

We are so excited with the change.  I can’t wait to see it tomorrow when it’s painted!

Other progress we’ve made this week is with the window treatments.  I gave Tabitha a selection of ready-made window treatments to pick form and she picked the middle option shown here:

She picked the middle option (that was also my favorite!)

I bought two pair of these panels. With one pair, I’ll add lining and replace the grommets with a shirred header and they’ll hang in the hang-out part of her room.  The second pair will be totally remade into London shades with blackout lining and will hang in the plant ledge, which is where Tabitha’s bed will go.  I usually love working with ready-made panels because it’s an inexpensive way to get lots of fabric yardage.  In this case, however, the panels had issues.  In both pair that I bought, the pattern ran one way on one panel and the other way on the other panel.  This meant I couldn’t keep the grommeted headers, which was really okay with me, but then I lost the 95″ height of the panels by cutting the exiting header off and creating a new one.  This also meant that I had to resew more of the London shades than I was planning to.  But still starting with pre-made panels that have side hems and hems can save a lot of time.  Tune in next week to see the final result.

This week, we also started updating Tabitha’s existing IKEA Micke desk.  It had pink accents and we are covering the pink with either gold metallic spray paint or gold metallic duct tape.  Here’s a before picture:

Pink and white desk.

Here’s an in-progress picture:

We also painted Tabitha’s existing mirror that was pink:

Pink mirror in Tabitha’s bathroom.

It’s now off-white to match our trim paint:

Thanks again to  Linda at Calling It Home, who hosts this event twice a year.  It’ a six week long blog event where 20 participants and many more linking participants spend the weeks redecorating one room and blogging about it.  You can catch my first, second,  third, and fourth ORC’s here.  To see my progress this time around, see Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4.

Next week is the reveal.  We have a very busy weekend and really the weekend is the only chance I have of getting pictures with daylight.  I am hoping I can make that happen.  Hope you all have a wonderful week!

Rachel