Welcome to Week Five of the Fall 2024 One Room Challenge! In case you’re new here, I’m an interior designer based in Great Falls, Virginia, and since 2022, while concurrently transforming my clients’ homes, I’ve also been transforming one room at a time in my own home, and documenting the process on my blog and social media for the One Room Challenge. The ORC is a bi-annual event, where every spring and fall, designers, home bloggers and DIY’ers make over a room in 8 weeks. It’s not a competition, as there is no winner, but it is a super-fun, supportive online challenge that really works to inspire a person to get a space completed in a short amount of time! And for those who just want to follow along, it’s also super fun and informative to keep up with the weekly progress, and see all of the “Reveals” on Week Eight!! I highly recommend you check out all of the other participants here!
For this One Room Challenge, I’m transforming our previously bland and uninspiring Primary Bedroom and Sitting Room into a “Romantic Retreat”, full of colors, textures, patterns, and lots of good vibes! In Week One I showed you the Before Photos, along with the inspiration for the Romantic Retreat, in Week Two I documented the Renovations we’ve done to the room, in Week Three I shared how I chose to try out a new paint trend called “Double Drenching” for all the walls and trim in the two rooms, Week Four I revealed the installation of the Wallpaper Mural in the sitting room, and this week – well it’s not as exciting as a wallpaper mural – but I’m going to show you my process for styling a cute little bookshelf. So go check out the past four weeks, and meet me back here in a few!
Week Five Progress
Before I show you how I style a bookshelf, I just want to say that before I start a new One Room Challenge project, I typically look at my entire to-do list for the room, and try to decide on which weeks I’ll post about each big element, and I try to go in order of what is actually happening in the room at that point in time. That said, as with any home project, there are bumps in the road, delays, and sometimes decision fatigue – or just straight up fatigue!! It’s been a combination of all of those things happening the past week, and although I had a productive weekend, I was working on a lot of “little” details – smaller DIY’s that all need to be done to help complete the room – but most of them are not completely finished. I’ve been busy with client projects in the last week as well, so I haven’t had as much time to focus on my own project. The original plan was to post about lighting and window treatments this week. All of the lighting is installed, (and I LOVE it), apart from a very special, antique, family heirloom table lamp that my parents are giving me. It’s very old and very fragile, and since my parents were planning to drive to Virginia (from Arizona!) next week, they’re driving it all the way here.The window treatments – which include the semi-custom curtains and sheers in the bedroom and the fully custom relaxed roman shades in the sitting room – are gorgeous. The bedroom curtains have been installed for a few weeks, but I just picked up the shades from my workroom on Monday, and haven’t had a chance to install them yet. Since nothing BIG happened this past week, I’m keeping it short and sweet with a little Bookshelf Styling tutorial, and hopefully next week I’ll have more to show and tell!
Choosing a Bookshelf for the Romantic Retreat
Ever since we moved to this house in July of 2022, our Primary Bedroom has been unfinished, mainly because I knew I would likely get to it after I’d completed the main living spaces, and kids’ rooms and bathrooms. I’ve had artwork and bins full of books and decorative objects sitting around for too long! The bedroom in our old house had a wall of built-ins, where I always kept the books my husband and were reading, and of course, I also added in plenty of decorative objects to the built-ins as well for visual interest. But this room has no built-ins (other than the TV “cubby” that was over the fireplace which we just closed up!), so I needed a spot to store some books and decor. There weren’t a lot of places that I could fit a bookshelf in either the bedroom or sitting room. The bedroom wall space is mostly taken up by the bed, nightstands, and fireplace, and then the big bay window isn’t really prime real estate for a bookshelf. I suppose we could have fit something on the angled wall to the left of the bed, but that felt odd to me. It made more sense to have a bookshelf in the sitting room, but with the wallpaper mural on the entire back wall, I didn’t want to cover it up, and then the huge armoire, and the new coffee bar (can’t wait to reveal it!), there was really only one little corner that worked for a bookshelf:
I first thought maybe I could find a vintage etagere or bookshelf, and scoured FaceBook Marketplace for a few weeks, and saved a couple of cool options:
Although I wasn’t finding the perfect vintage bookshelf, I did happen upon a totally FABULOUS little MCM side table that I nabbed for $25!!!
Finding that little side table was so lucky, and is a great reminder that if you really love something, you’ll find a way to work it into your home. But back to the etagere, I knew that since I was looking for something that had to have pretty specific measurements, I might be better off looking at new pieces, and I knew there would be plenty of options out there to choose from. One quick search on Pinterest for “Gold Etagere” or “Narrow Bookshelf” brings up LOTS of inexpensive options that fit the bill in terms of size and general style:
So sometimes when I have too many options, I like to narrow it down for myself. I didn’t want something totally basic, but I also didn’t want a piece that would steal attention from the other pieces (like my huge, scrolled armoire) in the room. So thought about what SHAPE would be interesting yet neutral enough to play nicely with all the other furniture. And then I happened to be scrolling through my camera roll one day, and saw this photo I had taken a couple of years ago at one of our favorite hotels we’ve stayed at in Oceanside, CA while visiting family:
I love the arched brass poles on this vintage luggage rack, and decided that would be a perfect shape for the bookshelf. By making that decision, I was able to narrow the search down from dozens of options to just a few that now fit my size AND shape criteria. And here’s the one I chose:
This bookshelf ticked all the boxes – Size, shape, price, and great reviews! I was a little worried about the faux marble shelves, but I did like they way they’re oval shaped, and in person, the “marble veining” is actually pretty realistic. BUT, I was not happy with the color of the “brass” metal support pieces. As soon as I opened the box, I could see they were too yellow, and didn’t have much of a metallic sheen to them:
I knew that with some gold spray paint, these supports could look much better, so I screwed in the connector bolts, and then stuck those into styrofoam, hoping they would stand up enough to spray paint all around them.
I used this Behr Premium Metallic Gold Hi-Gloss Shine Spray paint because it looked the closest to unlacquered brass of all of the gold spray paints at Home Depot. I bought two cans, and used about one and a half. Since the weather was cool last weekend, I gave them plenty of time to dry in between coats, and left them out overnight after the last coat. I was happy with the result, and although it’s not a huge difference, the metal support pieces now look much more like real brass:
The next day, I assembled the bookshelf – and just as the reviews said – it was super easy to put together. Here it is, all assembled, and ready for styling:
How to Style a Bookshelf
Now that this cute little etagere/ bookshelf was spruced up with gold spray paint and assembled, it was time to add some fun! I started by gathering all of my books and decorative objects that I planned to use. Whenever I’m styling a space for myself, or clients, I try to have a little more than I know I’ll need, so that I feel like I have free rein to try out lots of options. As I mentioned above, I had lots of decorative objects that hadn’t yet found a home in our bedroom after we moved here, so I had all of that, along with a few new things to add in, as well as books. I have a collection of old glass apothecary bottles that I found when we lived in Cape Town, so I started with those on the top shelf – grouping collections together always makes more of an impact than spreading them out.
On the next shelf, I started with a pretty plate I found at HomeGoods (marked down to $2!!), on a clear acrylic plate stand, with a vintage Japanese print of doves in the background, and a small stack of books (handpicked for their harmonious colors), topped with a pretty shell “box” from Thailand:
On the third shelf, I started with this adorable tray from World Market a dear friend gave me recently, then leaned a framed photo from our wedding with our wedding invitation at the back, and added a family photo ( from 2009, when my kiddos were little), and a crystal clock my aunt gave to me as a bridal shower gift in 1996!
On the fourth shelf, I stacked some coffee table books vertically (which just happen to be in my color scheme!), propped up with a pretty rose quartz and glass bookend, a few smaller books topped with a colorful glass candlestick, and layered in a card my husband gave me which I framed.
The bottom shelf is mostly functional, serving to hold all books:
And here is the finished, styled bookshelf in full!
My Top Five Tips for Styling a Bookshelf
1. Make sure to gather all of your books and objects together first so they’re close at hand while you’re styling each shelf
2. Don’t worry if all of your books aren’t in your color scheme – if your decorative accessories are within your palette – they’ll help pull everything together
3. Use a combination of books and decorative objects for plenty of visual interest.
4. Don’t be afraid to play and be curious: switch things around, stack books both vertically and horizontally, and layer photos or small art behind the objects.
5.Take a few steps back as you work to look at the bookshelf composition as a whole so you can fill in or edit where necessary
So that’s it for this week, folks! Thanks so much for stopping by, and please tune in next week for more details – likely the window treatments and lighting – for the Romantic Retreat! And don’t forget to catch up on all the other ORC participants weekly progress here!
Cheers!
Justine
Here is my ORC progress
Week 1 || Week 2 || Week 3 || Week 4 || Week 5 || Week 6 || Week 7 || Week 8
