This year, I’ve decided to participate in the One Room Challenge (ORC). I wanted to participate earlier this year but with all the moving and changes happening, it just wasn’t feasible! But now with things calmer and us settled in a little more, it’s a GO!
The main level of the house is looking pretty good. The office is done for now. The great room is almost done. The kitchen cabinets need to be painted, but other than than, the kitchen is done for now. The dining room is also done for now. And the study is a hot mess, but we’ll get to that shortly! The music room is one of the rooms that you see right when you walk in, so it made sense to tackle that first (rather than the study that is tucked behind the office).
So, here is what the room looked like when we moved in:
And here is the music room currently after paint and a new light fixture:
What I like about the room is that the ceilings are high and the molding is beautiful. The bay window is great although, in general, the room is a bit on the dark side. The room gets afternoon sun from the west but it’s tucked in an alcove so it never gets really bright in here.
I’m keeping and working with a lot of the pieces in the room to include the grand piano, the antique buffet, and maybe the two light blue velvet chairs. I’ve also had this ashtray in between the two chairs that I got from Goodwill in college so it’s staying as well. And, I just installed the light fixture a few months ago so that’s staying.
The television was just set in the room because we have no where else to put it so that’s going and so is the plant that used to be in our covered porch at our last house but for now is just wandering from room to room.
So, in short, there’s a lot to work with in this room since the bones are good so let’s get to the plans to make the space look even better!
Plans
I’m looking for this room to be a sitting/piano area and I also want to showcase the artwork that I’ve collected over the years. I’m not a fine art collector by any means, and the art I’ve collected is really only sentimental or inexpensive art that I’ve picked up on our travels. We’ve been to Thailand, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Cuba, and Cambodia to name a few places and we’ve picked up art made by local artists from almost every country we’ve visited. I’d like to use the walls behind the piano to showcase the pieces.
Because this room doesn’t get a lot of light, the light wall color in here looks dingy so, I’m going to paint the walls a dark color like I did in the office, which faces the same direction and gets the same light. That way the art takes center stage against a dark, neutral background.
Initially I thought I’d go with wallpaper, but after seeing thousands of samples, nothing really jumped out at me. Maybe I’m just not a wallpaper kind of person, I don’t know… But, I still wanted dimension on the walls that I think wallpaper brings. So, I’m going to try lime washing the walls. Limewashing is normally a procedure that you do to exterior brick walls, but when it’s done on interior walls it’s beautiful!
I’ve chosen a dark gray, almost black, color and I also want to incorporate a lot of texture so I also ordered white so that I can mix it in with the black to create some areas of contrast. I’m really just winging it here so it will be a surprise to all of us (me included) to see what the end result looks like.
And, I want to incorporate some fluting/reeding to the bottom of the chair rail and will most likely paint that a similar color but in semi-gloss or gloss. Or I”ll go completely the opposite and paint it an off white in keeping with the piano theme. This particular wall treatment is also something I’ve never done before so it will be crap shoot if it works out or not! I’m hopeful though as YouTube has taught me I can do just about anything (including learning how to perform open heart surgery, seriously, there’s a video on that 😳).
Okay, so those are the big plans for this room. Wish me luck that I can get it done before ORC ends in 8 weeks!
