My Australia One Room Challenge

Welcome to the Fall (or spring here in Perth, Australia) 2017 One Room Challenge.  If you are not familiar with it, this is where design bloggers completely transform a space in just six weeks, documenting the process on their blogs, and revealing a brand new room at the end.  If you are new here I’m Jane and I blog at Organised Pretty Home, which is all about the best organising and decor ideas for your family home.  Welcome! This is my FIRST TIME participating in the One Room Challenge and I am participating as an Australian blogger.   Does that make it an Australia One Room Challenge?

Gosh I am feeling both excited and nervous.  6 weeks is not a long time!!  Are my plans overly ambitious or not brave enough??  Well I did take on the project of renovating my kitchen on my own this time last year.  Yes that was crazy!!

The Room

For my ORC debut, I am planning on completely transforming our family living area.

Let me tell you, I’ve partly chosen this room because it does need a lot of lovin’.  More than a few months ago, I decided to empty out my home office room come junk room into the living area.  See the photo below.

My thinking was that the chaos and mess would encourage me to completely declutter all that stuff, as well as what was already in the living room.  Along the lines of… “If I make a bigger mess, I will have less mess in the end!”  It’s sort of worked!

It has made a difference to see just how much CLUTTER had accumulated over 10 plus years of living in this house, just from two rooms.  It was a lot stuff!  Thankfully, I have made progress on the sorting side and now am ready to make the living room pretty and functional again.

BEFORE

What I Do Like About This Room

I love the huge window in this room which lets in a lot of light, especially up one end of the room.   It also gives us great views onto the gum trees in the front yard.  So whatever I do with the room needs to maximise those features.

The room was painted about four years ago when we ripped up the carpet and installed laminate floor boards and skirting.  I do prefer floor boards and tiles to carpet, in a home with kids.  I reckon it is much easier to keep clean and maintain.  It also helps that Perth winters are so mild!

The large white square on the wall was for the video projector we had for watching movies on.  It made a great big screen! However the video projector has now been decluttered and sold so the wall needs repainting.  I plan on sticking with the same wall colour, which is a warm neutral (Dulux Hog Bristle).  Oh and yes that brown painted door will get a makeover as well!

Now What I Don’t Like About This Room

Mainly that the lighting is really poor!  It’s a long room and the one overhead light is not adequate.  Picture my 10 year old daughter, squinting to see the words of the book she is reading.   As most of us are avid readers in our family, I want to have a few spaces in the room with comfortable lighting and seating to enjoy a book or two.

One of the main changes will be less storage furniture!  Yes, seriously, in my goal to have a life with less stuff, I want to be able to contain everything we have to the one cabinet.  Will see how I go with that!  The challenge is then how to fill out the space so that it still feels comfortable and relaxing, rather than empty.

So Here’s The Plan For Our Living Room!

This also includes a few DIY projects!

Oh, yes… there’s recovering a vintage armchair that is in pieces at the moment.  I know, what am I thinking!  Then, creating a set of framed prints from photos I have taken of local West Australian wild flowers, and updating our family gallery wall.  Doable!

Hubby is supporting this Australia One Room Challenge project by hopefully building a barn door to hang over the archway we have in the room.  It will be made from pallet wood.  Then I’ll also use pallet wood to makeover our existing MDF coffee table.  Side rant, I hate MDF furniture.  You know the wood furniture now days, that’s not real wood.  It can’t be sanded back and  be repainted, and it is almost impossible to repair once damaged.  I discovered after sanding my painted coffee table that I was actually sanding back a wood veneer over MDF.  So much for the raw wood look table I was after! But we have come up with a plan to salvage this coffee table after all and re-use it in this room.

Can’t wait!

Now, let’s all hop over to Calling it Home to check out what the 20 featured bloggers and other guest participants are working on this season. I’m so happy to be able to join in, and can’t wait to see this room come together over the next six weeks.

You can follow the progress of this room, by connecting with me on Facebook or by receiving weekly updates by email.