Inspiration & Color Story: ORC Week 2

Hey friends! It’s week two of the One Room Challenge, and today I’m sharing the inspiration and color story for my daughter’s budget friendly bedroom refresh. Last week (ORC Week 1) I revealed the mood board and general plan of action. With not much progress in the bedroom this week I thought I would bring you along on my design process but first, lets take a look at what I did get done this week.

Gracie will be staying in her room for as long as possible. Eight weeks is a long time to bunk in with her sister, so I needed to make space! I removed the second bed, moved all of her older sisters prized possessions junk into her bedroom, and took down the shelves and lights. Now that I had some space the priority was to remove the windows (don’t worry we have storm windows) before the temps get too low. The windows are original to the house and at 120 years old need some love! Head on over the Instagram for some time lapsed window removal awesomeness. Fortunately my Dad offered to take the window sashes and work on them in his garage – painting, glazing and replacing a cracked window pane. He’s my MVP of the week.

With the windows finally open and out (a lot are painted shut) we discovered that one of her storm windows had pulled away from the house creating a space for water to collect. The previous owners had simply caulked the hole instead of fixing the problem (UGH) so now we have some rot to repair on the sill of the window. Until we can fix it this weekend duct tape for the win! While duct taping my inner voice was repeating this mantra, “I love my old house, I love my old house. It’s a lot of work but I love my old house.”

So now that we’re caught up with the work from this week let’s chat about the fun stuff – inspiration and color story for Gracie’s bedroom. When chatting with her about colors, she requested light blue and purple, bright barney purple. Light blue I can work with but barney purple is a tough color for me. For one, I think it’s juvenile and won’t age well. Secondly, while her space should reflect her it also needs to be cohesive with other rooms in our home and barney purple doesn’t fit in.

For me, when designing a space I need to have a jumping off point, an inspiration piece. For my older daughter’s bedroom it was a vintage pillow, for my bedroom the curtains. It doesn’t matter what the inspiration is but once you find it sourcing and pulling the space together becomes easier.

my goal was to find a inspiration piece that included purple for the launching of the room design.

For Gracie’s room it is a beautiful mauve quilt that started my wheels spinning. It ticked the purple box but also felt muted and sophisticated. The secondary color, light blue, will be introduced in artwork, lamp and a throw pillow. But if I’m being honest I was feeling guilty about the lack of purple, nothing like Mom guilt, and knew a punch of it was needed in her bedroom. Luckily google searches are my greatest sourcing weapon and a quick search of “purple area rug” landed the perfect option.

And that leads us to her walls. I think kids bedrooms should be easily transitioned. If her purple phase ends we can easily replace her quilt or rug and have an instant bedroom refresh but I do not want to be repainting! Although she would have loved purple walls, I convinced her a fun floral stencil in a neutral color was the better option! We are still playing around with the color but for now, did a mock up and I’m in love! It’s going to be the perfect backdrop and a lot of work which I plan on tackling next week.

Be sure to head over to the One Room Challenge Blog to check out all of the spaces that the designers and guest participants will be making over. My favorite part besides tackling a space is following along and encouraging participants along the way.