Welcome to Week Seven 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, for Week Five I showed you my process for styling a bookshelf, and last week – Week Six – I shared all the details of the new lighting and window treatments I’ve added to the spaces. This week, I’m super excited to show you all of the furniture makeovers and transformations that I’ve dreamt up, and my fantastic tradespeople have made happen!
Fabulous yet Frugal Furniture
When I decided to participate in the One Room Challenge this fall, I originally wanted to renovate our primary bathroom. Just like I do with all of my client projects, I worked out a budget for the bathroom, which included high/mid/low options for everything from tile to faucets to tubs, and then also got quotes for the labor. By the time I added everything up, the bathroom was going to cost over $30k, and that was for mid-to-low range finishes. This was more than we felt comfortable paying at this time, so I decided to pivot and redecorate our primary bedroom instead. As mentioned in previous blog posts, the room was exactly the same as it was when we moved in over two years ago, apart from the addition of our furniture. Thankfully, the room didn’t need major renovations, and we were happy to keep most of the furniture – the bed, the mattress, the armoire, and some seating. I knew we needed to either replace or upgrade our nightstands (which we had owned since about 1998!), our coffee station. (we have coffee in bed every morning, a tradition/habit we started many years ago), and I also wanted one more chair for the sitting room, a side table for next to it, and a bigger bench for the end of the bed. Now, the question was, how was I going to do all of this on a budget?? Facebook Marketplace. imagination, and talented tradespeople, that’s how!!
Next-Level Nightstands
Lucky for me, I have some amazing tradespeople in my back pocket who I go to for furniture refinishing and reupholstering all the time for my clients! I’ve been working with Grace Frye of ReFryed Furniture for several years, and she has transformed some amazing pieces of vintage furniture for me and many of my clients. Grace works full-time as an RN, and she also recently decided to niche her furniture refinishing business by specializing in wood-stained, mid-century modern furniture, and not taking on commissions. So when I needed to have a client’s contemporary bedside tables painted a few months ago, I knew I needed to find a furniture flipper who was adept at painting pieces, as well as open to doing custom work. I headed to Facebook Marketplace, and with a little searching, found Becky Brent Bertshinger of Bertschtree Living. Becky is incredibly creative and talented – check out her instagram and FaceBook Marketplace profile to see all of her amazing flips! After doing an amazing job on my client’s nightstands, I couldn’t wait to see what she could do with my circa 1998 nightstands! Here’s what they looked like in our old bedroom:
I had bought these nightstands shortly after we moved to South Africa, when I was working for a large home furnishings store called Wetherly’s. They were very well-made out of African mahogany, and originally finished in a typical 90’s “Espresso” dark brown stain. Before we moved back to the States in 2009, I had them painted in the ivory antiqued finish you see above, to match a vintage headboard we owned at the time. The color still worked with the mauve velvet bed from Wayfair you see above, which we bought several years ago, so that’s how they’ve stayed since. Here’s a close-up:
There wasn’t anything really wrong with them before – they were still in excellent condition, functioned and fit well in our space, and have a nifty little tray that pulls out at the top for morning coffee – I was just kind of tired of them after all these years! I considered buying these beauties from Anthropologie:
I loved the lucite legs and knobs, but at almost $600 each, they were not in the budget. I also really liked the idea of something with a marble top, and maybe a pop of color that shook up the tone-on-tone bedroom a little bit. I showed Becky some of my inspiration, and we were off to a great start! She had the fantastic idea of adding marble to the tops of my nightstands, and was able to recycle the tops of two side tables she already owned. She also suggested we remove the base of the nightstands so that we could add legs. Here’s a photo she snapped to give me an idea of how they would look:
Our next decision was the paint color. I thought about keeping them mauve to sort of blend in with the bed, walls, and trim, or painting them in a seafoam color to pull in the colors of the sitting room. As you know by now, my process for making these kinds of decisions almost always means trying them out on a mood board:
Both of these looked so pretty with my bed, bedding, paint, and curtains, and either color would have been a safe option. But when I’m doing a project in my own home, I like to push myself to try things that are even a little out of my own comfort zone, just like I do with my clients. I looked to my gorgeous wallpaper mural for inspiration. Even though it would be across from the bed in the sitting room, it was the main jumping off point for the room and the color palette, so it made sense to pull from it.
I looked at what colors really pop off the mural the most – and thought a rich magenta might be an interesting color to pull into the bedroom. Of course, I had to check it out in a mood board first!
Although there weren’t many magenta nightstands online to use as subs in my design, seeing the color of these on the mood board was enough for me to fall in love with the idea! I pulled out my paint deck, and looked at several bigger chips in my freshly painted room to see what tone worked the best. I landed on Sherwin-Williams Framboise, a truly gorgeous, deep and rich magenta:
I sent the color choice to Becky, and by the next day had them painted! Here are some progress photos she sent along the way:
It was so fun collaborating with Becky, because we both came up with some great ideas for the hardware and new legs! We thought about using similar legs to the Anthro nightstands above, but they would have added too much height to my nightstands. My very favorite shape is a circle, an orb or a sphere, and I love the current trend of completely round ball feet on furniture. I found wooden ball feet that we could have painted to match the nightstands, but I wanted a little more contrast. Then I found these cuties on Amazon:
We found round lucite knobs for the drawers on Amazon as well:
And Becky had the idea to add gold back plates to them, which is a small detail that made a big impact. She already had these knobs that came with backplates:
The actual knob and backplate are two separate pieces, so she used the backplates with the lucite knobs. Becky also had the idea to paint the pull-out tray and backboards of the nightstands metallic gold:
Together we found this fun peel-and-stick wallpaper to line the inside of the drawers:
And – Wa-la – the Fabulous “New” Nightstands!!
Creatively Customized Coffee Station
With the nightstands solved, it was time to figure out a solution for a coffee station. As I mentioned above, my husband and I are major coffee addicts, and started making coffee every morning in our bedroom, probably around the time we first started having kids. Our home in Cape Town was double-story, with a somewhat precarious vintage wrought iron spiral staircase, so we started bringing a coffee tray upstairs every night so we could have coffee in bed while we snuggled with our kiddos. We make our coffee with a French Press, so all we really needed was an electric kettle, the coffee press, some milk, coffee, and a couple of mugs to make our morning cuppas, and we had a small vintage, secretary style desk in our room that I used to hold the electric kettle and set the tray on. When we moved back to the States, our first house had a little wet bar built-into the bedroom, so the tradition continued there. When we moved here, I went back to using the vintage secretary desk, but it wasn’t ideal.
We could barely fit a mini-fridge for our creamer, and a kettle in the main section, and weren’t able to close the drop-down door to conceal them. Everything was out in the open, and the tray for our mugs and coffee press barely fit on top. I knew I wanted something that would hold a bigger mini-fridge (the old one was super short and our creamer was too tall to fit inside!), and I also knew I wanted to keep the coffee bar in the sitting room. I spent a lot of time thinking about what the best solution would be, and even thought about retro-fitting a few shelves inside the vintage armoire to hold everything:
But as you can see, at only 19″ wide, it would have been very difficult to fit everything, besides the fact that I actually use the armoire for clothing storage since my closet is fairly small! I determined that the angled wall between the french doors leading onto the balcony and the window (where the chair is sitting in the photo above) would be the best spot for a coffee bar, as the armoire had to stay where it was, and I didn’t want a big piece of furniture in front of the wallpaper mural. With that in mind, I started searching facebook marketplace for a piece of furniture that I could have Becky transform, but to be honest, I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for, so I sketched out the dimensions for a new coffee bar, to help me envision the ideal size and function a new piece would offer:
Having a sketch of what dimensions would work best for a coffee bar helped me narrow down my choices, and having an idea of how I wanted it to function helped envision the right piece. But what I was looking for was essentially a small server or sideboard, and since the wall I knew we only had so much space along that angled wall, I had to find something pretty specific. I also wanted a piece that would work stylistically with the armoire, so that narrowed down the options even more. I told Becky that I was having a hard time finding the right piece, so she took a look at her own vintage furniture inventory and sent me this vintage Drexel Heritage bar:
I’ll admit, it was not love at first sight when I saw this piece! It was big, and brown, and very 70’s, but I knew Becky had a vision and could make it look totally different, just like she did with my nightstands. I had sent her my sketch, and she assured me that by removing the base, like she did to the nightstands, she could add legs, which would make it look more updated and elegant. The measurements were perfect, and although the original top was made to slide open and give more serving space, I didn’t need that, so Becky said she could screw the sliding top in place to keep it stationary, and add Bondo to conceal the gap. There wasn’t a drawer on the outside, but there was one on the inside, and a shelf could be removed to make space for a larger mini-fridge. Becky also had the idea to add wood fluting to the inset of the doors, and sent me a rough mock-up of her thoughts:
I was totally on board with the new base, legs and hardware, but there was something about the original door detailing I liked and I could imagine that painted in a high-gloss lacquer finish, it could look very Hollywood Regency. Becky agreed, so we scrapped the fluting idea, and decided that painting it the same gorgeous color as the nightstands made sense, to carry the color into the sitting room. Becky got started, and here are a few progress shots:
I loved the idea of the coffee bar looking like a relative, like maybe an “cousin” to the nightstands, but not a “sibling”! In other words, I wanted them to look like they came from the same furniture family, and shared certain details like the color, but other elements could be similar but not the same, like the legs and hardware. This piece needed a bit of height, so adding taller lucite legs would raise it up just enough, and I promptly ordered these legs, which I also used on the sofa in my Whimsical Parlor in 2023!
And we found these oversized round lucite knobs for the doors:
Becky already had some round, brass backplates to add, which like the nightstands, just gave the door hardware so much more presence. Here is the completed Coffee Station!
But this new Coffee Bar isn’t just beautiful, it is totally functional, and had made our morning coffee ritual that much more enjoyable. Look at how perfectly the inside turned out!
Here is a close-up of the inside!
It might sound silly, but using this gorgeous, totally customized piece of furniture every day brings me so much joy! I am so very grateful to Becky of Bertschtree Living for being so willing to go the extra mile to make this piece so special. If you live in the DMV, and are looking for unique, quality, beautifully refinished furniture, please follow Becky’s Marketplace listings, and her Instagram Account. She’s also happy to customize and update furniture you already own – do don’t get rid of grandma’s big, brown china cabinet – have Becky reinvent and refinish it!! What a great way to keep furniture out of landfills while incorporating family heirlooms into a modern interior!
Beguiling End-of-Bed Bench
As you can see in the photo of our old bedroom, we have this little bench that I had silver-leafed and upholstered to match the armchair (to the left in that same photo), when we lived in South Africa. It’s always felt a little small to sit at the end of a king-size bed, so now seemed like the right time to replace it. I had also splurged on one yard of this gorgeous fabric from Osborne & Little, and decided that using it to upholster a bench would be a great way to showcase it! I had seen the fabric a few years ago when my Osborne & Little rep gave me this sample book:
I had always dreamed of using this fabric somewhere because I adore the pattern and the unique mix of colors, and when I started the Romantic Retreat, I decided I had to track it down and use it somewhere! Sadly, even with my trade discount, this fabric was out of my price range. But not one to give up, I decided to search it up on eBay, and found it for $100/yard! Still very pricey, but I went ahead and splurged thinking I would use it to make one big pillow. But the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to use it on something a little more permanent than just a pillow that gets tossed off the bed every night. I started looking for a bench that I could use it on. The problem is, one yard is not nearly enough for an entire bench. I thought about buying the other 2.75 yards the eBay seller has, but really didn’t want to spend almost $400 on upholstery alone. I would still need the actual bench, and although I knew my upholsterers, MelEl Designs would give me a fair price for the labor, it would still add up to too much. I loved the oval bench with the gold legs I used in my mood board above, but it was longer than the width of my fabric, and expensive. It was time to get creative…
I figured out that if I found an upholstered bench where I could just reupholster part of it in the O & L fabric, like just the top, I could always use another less expensive fabric for the rest of the bench.
I started searching Facebook Marketplace again, but was mostly coming up with very dated looking benches that even with new upholstery, would not look like the modern, sexy bench I was imagining. Sometimes when searching FBMP, I find it helps to get more specific with what you’re looking for. So when I searched for “bench”, I got all kinds of things that were NOT what I wanted. When I put in “modern bench”, it narrowed the choices way down, and there was one that fit the bill!
I loved the price ($60!), the shape (ovals are my second favorite shape next to circles!), and the lucite legs, but the seller hadn’t listed the dimensions, and I needed to make sure my one yard of fabric would be enough to cover the top. She said she would send them when she got home later that evening, but I was too impatient, and popped the photo into Google search to see if I could find it – bingo!!
Of course I found it on Amazon, and although it was discontinued, it had the dimensions, and that’s all I needed to be sure the FBMP find would work. At 48″ long, and what looked like about 4″ deep from the top to the nail heads, I would *just* have enough fabric to cover the top – as long as I told my upholsterer to do it without the button tufting. Tufting requires more fabric, but I was find with no tufting since I wanted the bench to have a slightly more modern look. As soon as the seller confirmed the measurements were the same as Amazon, I told her I would pick it up!
Once I got it home, I laid out the O & L fabric on top to double check it would work. Luckily, I had some leftover aqua velvet from a previous project that would be perfect for the bottom half of the bench, and I decided to use some of the mauve velvet ribbon that I used on the custom lampshades, in place of the nail heads and piping.
My upholsterers just finished the bench today, and although they haven’t delivered it yet, they sent me this sneak peek so I could show you!
I cannot wait to see how it looks in the Romantic Retreat! My photographer, Mary Pat Collins is coming this Friday to shoot the rooms, so I’ll see you back here next week for the big reveal!! In the meantime, be sure to check out all of the other ORC participants’ Week Seven Progress here.
Cheers to Fab Interiors,
Justine
Here is my ORC progress
Week 1 || Week 2 || Week 3 || Week 4 || Week 5 || Week 6 || Week 7 || Week 8
