One Room Challenge Week 3: It looks like a room again!

Alternate titles: The Week that Ikea Betrayed Me, Don’t Cry Over Split Hardiebacker, How it Feels When Your Entire Home is Covered in Dust

Before I get in to all that, here’s a refresher on what’s going on around here: first of all, Welcome to J(M)V Style! If you’re here for the first time, we’re so excited that you came by to check things out!

The One Room Challenge is put together by Linda of Calling it Home for design bloggers twice a year, challenging them to makeover a space in the span of just 6 short weeks, with weekly updates so everyone can follow along in real time.

For each challenge, there are 20 featured bloggers– a group of super talented designers that we’ll follow every Wednesday. We’ve joined in as guest participants, and you’ll get to see what we’re up to every Thursday! We’re working on our outdated master bathroom, turning it into the Modern Nautical space of our dreams. The first week was all about our plans, and last week we talked about all the down and dirty demo that this space required. And this week, we’ve reached a turning point- it’s starting to look like a room again! It’s sort of crazy how much different a room looks when it’s down to the subfloor and studs, and thankfully we’re past that now. With the big tasks this week being drywall repair, tile prep, and painting, it was a very transformative week!

But let’s talk about why Ikea is now DEAD.TO.ME (ish), and how we had to make some adjustments. I was taping up the dimensions for our vanity so we could plan the height of our mirrors and the new junction boxes for the sconces, so I went to check the website for the dimensions on the sinks, faucets, and mirrors we were planning to get at Ikea- shown below.

 

Lo and behold, and sometime in the last THREE WEEKS, they’ve discontinued both the faucet, and the simple mirror we were going to DIY.

NOT.COOL.IKEA. I decided to take a frantic totally casual drive over to Ikea, (luckily, it’s only about 15 minutes from us) to see what the situation was, and check if there might be any remaining stock on the faucets. Because, you guys, I know this is a total First World Problem, but I really loved those faucets. I got so hooked on the idea of a matte black faucet- it was modern, simple, cool, and a GREAT price. But alas, no more stock in the ATL store, and while the customer service lady was very nice, it was frustrating to learn that Ikea doesn’t do any store-to-store shipping, so if there was stock in California, they won’t get it to you. She did look up stores near my friends and family in other areas (I was hoping to cajole someone into driving to their local Ikea for me, and paying them to ship the faucets) but still, no luck.

So it was back to the drawing board- but a good deal of research showed that there weren’t a ton of options. We were looking for a black single faucet, and there wasn’t much to be had at any sort of reasonable price. I can’t justify $400 for a faucet, especially when we need 2 of them. There are a few more Oil Rubbed Bronze options out there, but that just wasn’t the look I was going for- and I think it’s harder to trust that description online, because we saw it used for items that varied a lot in color. We didn’t want to end up with something that was really brown, because that wouldn’t be a good fit with the other finishes.

So then we decided that we’d just have to change course on all our fixtures. We were planning on black for the faucets, semi-frameless shower door, and shower fixtures. Are we ahead of a trend here? In like 3 years will the market be flooded with affordable black faucets and fixtures? Probably.

We still want to keep touches of black in the room, because I think that’s a great way to ground a space, and it can provide a definite modern touch. Our black will just be a bit more limited- a floating shelf above the toilet, the textile hanging over the closet opening, and maybe a little glimpse on the vanity door hardware. And I think it’s actually going to be even better the new way. So here’s how the space will look with polished nickel fixtures instead, mixed with some fun brass details. I think this mix of metals is going to be really beautiful, so I’m moving past the loss of my beloved black faucet.

As I mentioned above, this week has been a big turning point. It started out with a breakdown mild concern that there was too much work left for the 6 week timeframe. To be honest, this has been a challenging project. I guess the title makes sense, then 😉

Ben works in the film industry, which means very long days and somewhat unpredictable hours. He is an absolute champ and will come home at the end of a 14-hour day to tear tile off the floor or install the shower liner, but that’s also a lot to ask of him. I’ve been trying really hard to tackle the projects I can do alone so that when he gets home we can do about 45 minutes of focused work together.

What we’ve accomplished this week:

(1) Mortared in all the bathroom floor cement backer ?

Drywall Repair ?

(2) Painted the closet ceiling and walls ?

Refreshed the bathroom ceiling paint ?

(2) Installed a new (awesome! super-bright!) flushmount in the closet ?

(3) Installed our shower pre-slope and new drain ?

(4) Dry-fit the floor tile ?

Built and stained the new vanity top ?

Sewed the closet drapery ?

(5) Made our custom floating frame ?

Selected vanity and shelf paint colors ?

The first two weeks of tasks we tackled all seemed to be more difficult, and to take more time, than we had expected. We’re pretty confident in our physical abilities, and our resourcefulness to figure out how to do new things, but there was a lot of “new” at the start of this project. We haven’t done this kind of demo before, or this involved of plumbing work. Normally, I’m a big fan of the idea that there can be multiple ways to complete a project. “If you don’t have a certain tool, try things this way!” sort of thing- but the frustrating part about building the new shower pan is that we’ve seen examples of so.many.different ways to do it. It’s a very layered process, and it seemed like everyone did things a little bit differently. That made it really confusing to know what would be best for us and our space. We feel much better about it now- we think it’s important to make actions with confidence, but that was a definite struggle for this portion of the project.

We have a small home, so somehow renovating one of the smallest rooms in it has created chaos throughout the whole house. Ben’s closet is scattered throughout the office, tools are spilling into our bedroom, there are stacks of tile in the hallway, and there’s a vanity and TOILET in our dining room/entry, so… it’s been interesting. But each little thing that gets done helps to tone down that chaos and gets us super excited about this finished space.

Up next this week?

Finish the shower area and start tiling it

Tile floors

Paint walls

Bring toilet back in

Build floating shelf above toilet

Paint vanity

Wish us luck, we’ve still got a LOT to do, but we’re feeling good about it! We’ll see you for a great Five on Friday tomorrow, and Week 4 next Thursday (that should be a BIG, BIG update)!