Niki’s Studio: One Room Challenge Week 3

It’s here! The week three slump of the One Room Challenge! We start these things with such enthusiasm & gusto but a few weeks in you remember, you’ve got laundry, chores, and also a life to get to… and it’s time for a little break. This week was exactly that, I spent little time on the challenge and a lot of time getting some other things done, especially the necessary fall tasks like bringing in the porch furniture & finding inside homes for our potted plants.

The room itself sits much like it was at last weeks updates, except now there’s no power! Chris & his buddy Adam have been working on the electrical for our slow moving kitchen remodel, and I’ve decided to take that opportunity to get some much needed power up into my studio as one wall of it is situated conveniently above the open walls in the kitchen. Currently, the room has only a singular ceiling light & one poorly placed 2-prong outlet (the horror!). While switching that over to a 3 prong was definitely a priority & putting a new ceiling fixture in was definitely a necessity, it still left me with no outlets for many of the things I do in the space or light in my closet. So we’re going to add a long plug molding at the counter for all the things we need to plug in for crafts, from glue-guns to wax warmers.  We also need an outlet on the wall the closet sits on for our sewing machine and to add a light source for the closet. Because we aren’t going to get involved with patch the original plaster walls in the space this will take some creative fishing of wires & probably some wire molding, but given that though pretty, this is intended to be a utilitarian space, we are OK with that.

The Three Things We Got Done This Week: 

1. We chose a light fixture! Though D was overwhelmingly the favorite of just about everyone (even Chris liked it objectively the most as a light) we were worried that though it could be shortened enough to work with the ceiling light per the specs, we thought it would look funny at that height & potentially too big around, as the electrical is not centered on the room and we don’t have the budget to go changing that. So we opted for the one we BOTH liked second best, C! Bonus, it was also the most affordable option. It goes really well with the hardware for the cabinets & has the right modern meets traditional vibe to go with the lighting we have put in throughout the entire house so I really think we made the right choice. We’ll probably end up using D at the showroom as we need a fixture for the back office, so don’t worry, you’ll still get to see it somewhere!
2. We coordinated with our first sponsor! Yay, what an exciting step for the Blog! One of our favorite local design vendors, Judy Lake of Lake’s Lampshades in Pawlet, VT offered to sponsor us & create a beautiful custom shade for our task lamp that will go on the desk. We drove out to her shop on Saturday to talk details and hit it off! While I’d selected a couple options from our fabric library, she happened to have a vintage piece of embroidered fabric, in the right tones, just big enough to cover our shade – I decided that was kismet and too perfect to pass up, so me decided to go for it. She also gave me a copy of her book, “The Lampshade Lady’s Guide to Lighting Up Your Life,” which I am so excited to dive into! Not only does it give you great ideas for different kinds of lampshades & trims for them I didn’t even know existed – but amazing DIY’s like how to make a lamp out of a boot which I can’t wait to use! Such a perfect way to repurpose those stinkin’ cute cowboy child size boots kids grow out of so quickly! If this sounds up your alley, you can get your own here.

   

3. We got paint color matched to the black cabinetry, found our paint sprayer & mentally prepared ourselves for the task of not only painting, but cleaning the sprayer out when we’re done, something I’m already dreading. To be truthful, we could have sprayed the wall cabinets this weekend since we don’t need or want those installed to spray them, but we decided we don’t want to a) clean it twice or b) have the first time we use it be on the cabinets when it’s important they come out good. So, painting will have to wait til we build the shelves into the closet, at which point we’ll spray both the walls & the shelves.

   

Well, there you have it, we managed to turn a week of non-progress into a pretty long blog post… I hope you enjoyed this non-update. If you’re digging the one room challenge progress but didn’t get enough of a design dose from our post, be sure to head over to the One Room Challenge Blog to check out all the featured & guest designers spaces!

Looking forward to the next three weeks, I’m just going to repeat what fellow guest participant Maddy Teal keeps telling me like a mantra – “A lot can happen in Three Weeks!” because we’re both going to rock this and catch up!