Nursery to Big Girl Room: One Room Challenge – Week One

This post is sponsored by Houzz

I am so excited to announce that I’ll be participating in the One Room Challenge this round as a guest participant! It’s always been a bucket list dream of mine to be apart of the challenge and here I am! Pinch me!

If you’re new to the One Room Challenge, it’s an inspiring but crazy challenge to make over one room in your home in just 6 short weeks! I’ve always admired those who participated and were able to reveal beautiful rooms at the end of the 6 week timeline but aside from the major eye candy you get at the end, I love that the premise of the challenge pushes you to just finish! Which is exactly what I need for the space we’re tackling this season!

I can sometimes drag out a design and waffle with indecision but this time I can’t! The One Room Challenge is gonna…duh…challenge me and push me to finally finish this space so let’s jump right in and take a look at what room we’re making over in six short weeks:

BEFORE IMAGES

We’re converting our current “nursery” into an official big girl room for our almost three year old! She’s mastered the art of climbing out of her crib and after a minor foot injury from catapulting herself over the top, we decided it was finally time to transition her out of the crib whether we’re ready or not (emphasis on the not)!

Her room isn’t bad…it’s just kinda boring and the open concept closet drives me bonkers! If you’ve been here a while then you know that we had an open concept closet in her last nursery and it worked wonderfully when she was a baby and we were accessing it so often for supplies, but as she’s gotten older and now houses mostly toys, I’d really love to not have to look at all the stuff inside every minute of the day!

I’m really excited, but also really nervous, to get started and I just hope we can accomplish everything we have planned – AKA please don’t let me fail miserably in front of thousands of people! Ha!

GATHERING INSPIRATION

As soon as we signed on to participate in the One Room Challenge, I started gathering inspo for our space which is always the very first step of any new design project. One resource I love to use when looking for inspiration for my projects is Houzz. Their website is a one-stop-shop for all things design and their Home Design Ideas page is where I got started sourcing inspo for Emie’s nursery turned big girl room! I love how easy it is to filter through the results for the type of room inspiration you’re looking for just by clicking on the big icons across the top of the page:

Obviously I went straight to the Baby & Kids Design Ideas page and scrolled pages and pages (there’s 145,024 photos in this category alone!) of beautifully designed rooms – collecting little nuggets of inspiration every time a particular room resonated with what I envisioned Emie’s big girl room to be.

I loved the color palette of this one, the styling of this one, the architectural details of this one, and the whimsy of this one.

When you find an image you love, you just click on the inspiration photo and it takes you directly to the project page where it’ll display additional images from the same project/house, rooms in the same category with a similar color palette, a link to the designer’s website, and so much more!

THE DESIGN

Armed with my inspiration, I got to work on the design board for Emie’s room. Wanna see?

The to-do list for this space is growing by the minute, but here’s what we’re prioritizing and hoping to accomplish over the next 6 weeks:

• Furniture to grow with her – quality pieces that will grow with her well into those teen years!
• DIY closet doors – to hide all the mess and to save my sanity!
• Add a rug – to cover up her less than perfect carpet that isn’t in the budget to replace just yet!
• Install a new ceiling fan – the 90’s called and they want their ceiling fan back!
• Architectural interest – we’ll be adding millwork to the big blank walls to give her room depth!
• Paint – she requested a pink room so a pink room she’ll get but with a twist!

Oh boy! Here we go! The furniture is ordered and already starting to roll in and we’re tackling the first of the DIYs this weekend! To see how everyone else is doing in their ORC spaces click here and if you want to keep up with what we’re doing for the ORC behind the scenes, be sure to follow along on Instagram too! Wish us luck and see ya next week for another update!