One Room Challenge Reveal!!!

Swatts & Co Living and Dining Room: ORC Reveal!!

Finally. Wow. Not gonna lie, I didn’t really think finishing one (or two) rooms in 6-8 weeks was going to be a challenge. And I suppose it wouldn’t be if I didn’t have a job, or kids, or hadn’t just moved into a new house, etc. But therein lies the challenge.

Thank you to Linda Weinstein and Better Homes and Garden for Hosting sponsoring this event every year!!

Because of Covid and not being able to have any trades in the house, I learned a lot during this time period: how to tile, how to wallpaper over surfaces that shouldn’t be wallpapered, and that sometimes you don’t know what you want until you get it.

Remember the ‘before’ pictures? Do you remember the ‘before’ story? How this was our Plan E house, and we ended up here because of the pandemic and we weren’t going to stay very long because it was a bit smaller than we wanted(and I have to share a bathroom with my 3 children)?

It’s amazing how finishing just two rooms of your house makes you rethink all of that. I’m now in love with the house, the size, and the neighborhood and don’t plan to leave anytime soon.

When I started this I didn’t really have a plan except I knew I wanted to be able to re-use as much of our furniture and décor as possible, use red & blue as the main colors, and I wanted it to be the opposite of minimalism.

Those arched bookshelves were my starting point.  I found that pink/red palm wallpaper and immediately knew were I was going to put it.  Pretty much everything else was judged by the ‘will it work with the wallpaper?’ question because there was no way I wasn’t using it.

I painted the bookshelves and cabinet doors the same color/sheen as the walls (Regatta by SW) to make it blend in better. I contemplated painting the wood trim blue as well, but didn’t because:

1. I am very very lazy and I hate painting trim.

2. Painting original wood trim in a hundred year old house is a very serious polarizing issue somewhat akin to discussing politics and religion and I just didn’t want to go there.

3. See number 1

My absolute favorite part of this room is everything to do with the fireplace and these wall sconces.

I knew I was going to paint the fireplace, but I wanted to do something different, and no ‘normal’ colors seemed like a good choice. I remembered that I had a can of silver metallic paint left over from a project 6 years ago, which brought me back to the “use what I already” have goal. I painted that fireplace silver and never looked back.

If I’m honest, I’ll say that I was a little nervous about this fireplace. When you can’t find any inspo pics online there’s 1 of 2 reasons for that.

1. No one else has done it and taken pictures

2. It’s not a good idea and it hasn’t been done and photographed because it’s gonna look awful

But the biggest rewards come from the risks and that little nervous feeling in your stomach.

The tile was my very first tile job ever and I should admit I’ve been patting myself on the back ever since(humbleness is not a fault of mine…). My husband, the perfectionist, couldn’t even find many things to critique, so we know we’ve got a winner.

We did pretty well using what we had for this room.

• Couch: prior LR

• Eames Chair: prior reading area

• White chair: from master bedroom

• Rug: from prior master bedroom

• Bar Cart: From prior dining room

• Lucite shelving: from girls bedroom

• Black/White end table: from prior reading area.

So all we needed was some paint, light fixtures, curtains, end tables, art and a fireplace makeover.

No big deal, right? So much of a “no big deal” I decided I also needed to do the dining room at the same time. So much of a “no big deal” I almost didn’t finish either room in time, and was literally finishing finishing and hanging the art an hour before the photographer came.

Our table from the old house was too big to fit into this space, so we put it in the basement and I found this table on FB marketplace for $40 and spent about 17 hours sanding it and 17 minutes painting it.(I exaggerate, but you get the point.)

The large blue art is a cyanotype (a process using a photo negative, chemicals, and the sun to create the print) and I picked up the blue and red lady from a street artist in Greece last year. The artist told me she is a “Greek Mary Poppins”.

The tiled buffet is something I designed for our last house and is an Ikea hack that used to house my kids toys, and now houses our bar glasses and booze(I do believe the buffet is happier now, if not a little more tipsy).

I repainted the legs BM Snow Cone Green, for a fun pop of non-traditional color. This color was our old front door color and I’ve committed to using it in some way or another in every home we live in.

And the curtains…..ahhh, the curtains. They’re from Pierre Frey and I made them myself (once again, covid). Probably the only Pierre Frey curtains to be put together with hemming tape.

Because art is the frosting of design, I left that for last. So yummy and so very necessary.

If you follow my Ig stories, you’ll know I painted the black & white modern piece myself. George and his horse was inspired by an amazing piece of art I came across earlier this year that had Napoleon on a red horse with some other graffiti.

Despite how important I think art is, $6k for one piece wasn’t really in our budget, so I found an $88 portrait of GW online and went to town with paint and and my kids crayons(and maybe a little Snow Cone Green on the paintings edges because I couldn’t stop myself).

Also, you can never go wrong with flamingos, so I added some, because, why not? Can you find them?

Thank you so much for following along on this journey with me. There were times when I was really tired and I totally wanted to quit and just finish it later. But I am SO happy I kept on going and finished it, because when we get home from our 6 week road trip, I’m going to be returning to a somewhat finished house.

If you want to learn more about me and Swatts & Co, click here.

Thank you to Linda Weinstein and Better Homes and Gardens for sponsoring this event. It was really fun to be able to participate for the first (and hopefully the amnesia will kick in, so it won’t be the last) time.

Also, thank you to Dionel Fisher of The Mittentog for taking all of these great pictures!

If you guys are looking for more design inspiration, head to the One Room Challenge Blog and prepare to get lost in Design Wonderland.

To see the progress on this room click below:

Week One I Week Two I Week Three I Week Four I Week Five & Six I Week Seven

The Fireplace Tile Challenge: One Room Challenge Week 7.

The Fireplace Tile Challenge: One Room Challenge Week 7.

Wow, here we are and the one room challenge is almost done.

(To see where we started, click here: Week One, Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Six)

I saved the best and hardest project for last…not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous to do this one on my own. Per my husband, he didn’t doubt my abilities at designing the fireplace tile, but he severely doubted my abilities at executing said design with my own two hands.

Husbands are so optimistic and encouraging.

But it’s really nice to be able to prove them wrong.

So we started off with this fireplace- you’ve seen the progression to silver.

I played around with the tile pattern for a day or two, because I wasn’t sure what I wanted. As you can see the picture below, I played around A LOT. I wanted a modern pattern, since penny tile is pretty traditional, but I was constricted in the way the pattern could go because of the tile layout. So that knocked out squares and left me with straight lines, diagonal lines, and triangles, and diamonds.

I was getting pretty frustrated, and thought that maybe I should have a glass of wine and see if I got more creative the more inebriated I was, but I ran out of time for wine so had to do the whole thing sober. Since wine couldn’t move me, I kept going and let the spirit move me, and this is what the end result was.

It was a good 5 days of working on this every day and I finally got everything grouted. I also got myself grouted, and am still scrubbing grout off my legs 2 weeks later.

Below is a picture just after I grouted it, but I haven’t fully cleaned the grout off the tile yet, so it looks pretty murky.

Not gonna lie, I think I am more proud of this tile job than I am of most things in my life that I’ve accomplished. I now think I can tile the whole world…which I might try.

The husband got a light fixture up! And the house hasn’t burnt down because of it, so we are calling that a HUGE win. Some of our wiring is old knob and tube, so we were sort of crossing our fingers that he did it all correctly.

We started to accomplish some other small projects that I was leaving till the end in case I didn’t have time to finish. They’re sort of frosting on the cake…not completely necessary, but actually the best part. (because really, who wants cake without frosting???)

I wanted to do something in this arch to transition the blue wall into the lighter room, and decided to do a very simple modern pattern. I was sort of inspired by this tile that I love and had thought about using in the fireplace, but couldn’t seriously consider it since it was out of stock due to Covid.

So I got out some tape and paint and went to town. It took a ton of rounds of tape to finish all the lines I wanted, and then realized I could use a black paint pen and a ruler to get the look I wanted, so that saved me some time in the end.

You see those curtains up over there? It’s starting to get exciting over here.

I also saved George for last, but I don’t want George’s ghost reading this and feeling like he’s not as important as curtains and archways.

So…a while back I came across this painting above in one of my art catalogs and I fell in love with the colors and weirdness. My husband also loved it (so you know we are on to something). Cue the big disappointment when I saw the painting was like $6k….oddly enough, that wasn’t in our budget.

So I got creative. I looked for old men on a horse paintings and found good ol’ george. I then shamelessly re-created parts of the painting with my own $88 George Washington painting from Walmart.com.

In the pic below, he’s not completely done, but he’s getting close to being done. I added some tiny flamingos, because every old man on a horse portrait needs flamingos. I also went around the edges of the portrait with our old Lime Green front door paint, because….well, because why not??

(if you look close, you’ll see this color in one other spot in the rooms…I’ve decided I am going to incorporate this color into every house we own (BM Snow Cone Green if you’re curious)

George just hanging out in our basement

Stay tuned for the big reveal next week.

Oh I can hardly wait to see the pictures. And also- don’t forget to go and check out all the other crazy amazing transformations happening at the One Room Challenge site.

One Room Challenge: Week 6. Curtains, Tables, & Flamingos, OH MY!

One Room Challenge: Week 6. Curtains, Tables, & Flamingos, OH MY!

So here I sit in western Wyoming in a car that is shaking from the wind blowing crazy around us at a campsite we reserved but are going to leave because there's a chance we will all blow away down the canyon. And that's saying a lot since we all gained the Covid-19.

It’s Week 6 of the One Room Challenge and we’ve done some work in the past few weeks.  That’s all we’ve been doing as we were working 12-14 hour days trying to finish our room(s) before we left on our 6 week cross country road trip adventure extravaganza.

Okay this blue table- bought it for $40 on CL and finally finished sanding and painting it.  So much sanding.  Looks pretty sweet now though...especially next to those two new pieces of art I got- they are a cynaotype which uses a photo negative and a chemical process in the sun to achieve the look- no ink! Up close it’s on water color paper and looks super neat.

Yes, I just used the word neat.

Fabric for the dining room curtains finally came.  I’m in love with this fabric from Pierre Frey- the perfect mix of some old tradition with modern built in. Plus that red!

I also finally decided on living room curtains.  Covid really put me through the curtain ringer here. Almost as stressful as getting Covid and being on a ventilator, I’m sure.

My original LR curtain plan was these blue and red/pink numbers from Anthropologie. But then it turned out the blue was really more a of a green, and that wasn’t what I was going for, so back they went.

See? This is definitely green.

I wanted something blue and red- so found a bunch of different potential fabrics from spoon flower that I ordered samples of.  Except because of Covid I didn’t get the samples in time.  I can’t even list all the different fabrics I was interested in, but couldn’t get because of Covid.

I ordered these plain blue ones as backup but they were just too plain and boring and who wants to be boring?

I was on a crane kick from the crane spoon flower fabric I saw, so I searched for crane fabric and came across this Genevieve Gorder fabric.  So many fun colors. I ordered it in blue and black and figured I’d decide when it got here.  The blue arrived first- I loved the pattern but something just seemed off. So I started looking for other options online.

And then the black and white crane curtains came and saved the day and ended my obsessive compulsive curtain researching.

Once again, some amazing styling going on in those bookshelves. RIP my poor dead computer.

Because of Covid and everything being closed, I made and hemmed all the curtains for dining and living room by myself. Please note my definition of “made” is very loose.  I got some fabric hemming tape off amazon and hemmed those suckers all the way around. I then used curtain clips to connect them. It was super easy but time consuming.

But free, so there’s that. I saved so much money “sewing” my own curtains I’m basically making money over here.  I think that’s how that works?

Remember the mudroom paint color conundrum? I couldn’t handle the color and neither could my coworker, so we painted it black as originally planned.  She felt so strongly about it she offered to help me paint it.  I felt so sick of painting, that I took her up on it.

But realized I didn’t take a picture of it black so you’ll have to wait for the end product since I am currently sitting in the middle of Wyoming.

Okay phew.  That was a lot of talk about curtains and fabric.  But all the obsessing was worth it because both sets of curtains really make the rooms.  Along with all the other stuff.

Next week I’ll get into the process behind the fireplace tile and some finishing touches projects.

Oh yes, there was a big box on the fireplace a few weeks back.  This is George, and George lived in that box.  You might be disappointed because you’re like, “seriously?! George?!” We were waiting for George??!

George is getting a little makeover, and here’s a little sneak peek of his makeover. You didn’t think I was going to design a room in our new house and not involve some flamingos, did you?

I painted those flamingos, thank you very much. You can do anything you put your mind to and have google to look it up.

Thank you so much for following along this journey with us. We sort of suck at documenting it, but we are trying.

As always, don’t forget to check out the other amazing rooms being transformed during the One Room Challenge. There’s some cool stuff going on!!

Wait, What?! Is that Fireplace Silver?? ORC Week Three

Wait, What?! Is that Fireplace SILVER? ORC Week 3

All I gotta say is that I can’t imagine actually renovation a room in this 6-8 week time period.  I’m mostly just doing small projects and painting and fixing some stuff up and I feel like I don’t have time to get it all done.  (I believe that may have something to do with the 3 creatures who cling to my legs a lot, but could be other things).

We did make progress though this week! We still aren’t feeling 100%, but had some energy to get some junk done.

I spent my one days sans kids sanding/painting all the shelves and cabinet doors that go in the recessed arched bookcases.  Letting the paint cure a few days before I try to install them.  Especially because I just used normal wall paint I had leftover as opposed to spending $30 on a quart of cabinet paint.

These aren’t going to see much use, and mostly are just going to sit there and look pretty, so I didn’t see the point of the added expense (and trip to pick up the paint). 

Don’t it look pretty with those doors installed? 

My dad thought I was committing a sacrilege by painting the wood doors and shelving, but sacrilege and doing things I’m not supposed to like licking knives is what I live for. Also, he would decorate his house in real tree camo if given the opportunity, so I try not to take design advice from him.

I had to time to start cutting the wallpaper, and it made me wish I could install this on the ceiling. Talk about extra. But alas, a textured plastered ceiling with rounded edges is not conducive to wallpaper. Especially since the ceiling might fall down at any moment.

Onward to the fireplace. We started out with a painted gray brick fireplace.  I love painted brick fireplaces.  I don’t love gray.  When we moved in, this house was painted 50 shades of gray, and was about as boring as I assume that movie is.

Boring Gray Fireplace going on here.

I was thinking about what color I could paint the fireplace and I wanted something that would stand out.  I went through the whole rainbow, searching for ideas.  None of the colors really spoke to me…yes, colors speak.  Then I started thinking about the paint I already had in my garage and remembered those two cans of rustoleum metallic paint sitting there.

In all of its silver shiny glory

So, I searched for a metallic silver brick fireplace on the internet and couldn’t find any.  Not finding any similar pics of what I want to do is a fun and scary thing.  Fun because, “YAY something different”.  Scary because “ummmm…What if there aren’t any pictures because it’s a really really terrible idea and everyone already knows that they shouldn’t do it.  Or they did do it and it looked terrible and didn’t want to share the pictures”.

Mid-glazing

I knew the silver would way too extra in all of its glory, so I planned to darken/age it slightly by using my trusty old can of glaze (circa 2010…I’m really going back in time here with this one).  Now you can sit in my living room and not be blinding when the sunlight hits the fireplace.  That’ll be extra special for our houseguests.

I’m 98% confident that once I’ve got the whole room together it’s going to look amazing, but it really could go either way. 

But until then, here is a picture of the fireplace in all of its current glory with an even bigger experiment sitting in that cardboard box on top of it. 

George is in that box, and you’re gonna have to wait to see George. 

Besides George, what’s still to do?

• we gotta figure out fireplace tile situation and tile (choosing from samples at bottom of fireplace)

• finishing ordering and hang light fixtures

• finish curtain rods

• Figure out curtain situation (covid is really killing me here because I can’t get what I want

• Re-finish the dining room table

• Finish art for living room

• Paint entry way and mudroom.

• Some small spray paint crafts

• Style whole place

Holy crap. After reading all that I realized I need to get off my computer and go downstairs and start doing some stuff. Especially because we are going to try to get it done early and leave for a little camping adventure in a few weeks. (can’t social distance more than you can in the middle of the woods)

As always- don’t forget to go the One Room Challenge Blog and get a million more doses of design inspiration!

Blue-alicious. A paint Color Journey. ORC Week Two

Blue-alicious. A Paint Color Journey. ORC: Week Two

Week two of the One Room Challenge brought to you by the fog of sickness, craziness of moving and being driven literal bananas by 3 children.

I’m pretty sure we all have Covid, even though I tested negative..but with false negatives 30-40%, and having almost all the symptoms between us, it sort of makes sense.

First Coat of Honorable Blue by SW

So tired. But life must go on, and right now life includes the One Room Challenge. Life also includes raw sewage coming up into the basement of our new house due to a broken sewage pipe (thankfully on city property(we think)), but no one wants to read about that, so we are sticking to paint colors today.

All right- where were we? Blue-alicious should be the title of this room.  The color I had picked out for this room was Commodore blue by Sherwin Williams.  I was going off this swatch above from the computer, which looked the same as my SW paint swatch book in person. 

Now.  You will read to always get paint samples and try them on your walls prior to picking a color.  In fact, I ALWAYS advise my clients to get samples and try them on multiple walls to see what they look like IN the room on different walls with different light.

But sort of like a doctor tells his patients to lose weight and then goes and eats 4 donuts, I decided I didn’t need to do this.  There was a pandemic going on after all, and I was trying to decrease the amount of trips I needed to make to pick up paint from the curbside paint pick up.

Not only did I NOT do this, while on the phone with Sherwin Williams, I called an audible (the only football reference I know and will use) and changed my mind to Honorable Blue.  A blue with purple undertones. 

Yeah…I was sitting there staring at the paint deck looking at those purple undertones, and somehow still thought was a good idea.  (hint. It wasn’t).   See above.  Now you’re probably thinking it doesn’t look that bad- on my computer screen it looks less purple than it does on my phone, which looks less purple than in real life. Let’s just say it looked PURPLE!

Yay! Now after 3 coats of a purplish superman blue, I get to repaint!  Yay!

So I went and got 5 different colors and did what I should’ve done originally.  Now- you shouldn’t paint the swatches right on the wall when the colors are so crazy like this, because the wall color is going to throw off the real color of the swatch.  I also painted them on white paper so I could get a sense of the true color.  But I wanted to see how many coats it was gonna take to repaint over purple superman. 

From Left to Right: Commodore blue, Loyal Blue, Regatta, Salty Dog, Dress Blues

This is where it gets crazy, and why you should ALWAYS paint swatches before picking a color.  The color I liked the least prior and almost didn’t even get a sample of?  That’s the one that looked best in the room and I loved. 

Regatta by Sherwin Williams is the middle color and is what I picked.  See below after being completely repainted.

It’s actually exactly what I was looking for- less dark and more color than a navy, but not as bright and crazy as cobalt. It looks different in all different lighting situations which I LOVE.

And you can see what else we accomplished this week.  We moved all our crap into the house. 

Regarding paint in dining room…I think I might just leave it. Looks white to the eye, but is actually a very very pale gray. Pale enough for me to look sort of white, which means I probably won’t paint it right now, because we are going to have to get the ceilings fixed eventually, and then I can repaint then.

I’ll be lucky if I can get all the boxes unpacked and organized before the ORC ends, much less finish these rooms.  Holy Moly does everything take about 193 times longer when the children are around 24/7 and one is exhausted and sick.

You’re welcome for probably the least interesting ORC update of the year. Gonna go take a nap now…mmmkay?

To check out the progress of others during the ORC, head to this link and see what every body is doing!

One Room Challenge: Week One...Living & Dining Room Makeover by Swatts & Co

One Room Challenge: Week One…Living & Dining Room Makeover by Swatts & Co

A little more than two months ago I was in San Francisco at the Design Influencers Conference sitting less than 6 feet away (those were the days) from some awesome designer friends chatting about the One Room Challenge. 

The One Room Challenge is a bi-annual interior design event where designers/bloggers/home renovation enthusiasts transform a room in 6 weeks.  It’s a super fun event that I’ve watched from afar for years. 

Some of my friends were participating this year, and I was lamenting that I didn’t have any rooms in my house to re-do as I had literally just finished my whole house. (I know…poor poor pitiful me).

So I did what any rational human being would do, and I sold our house and we bought a really old house that needs a little loving. (that may not be exactly how things went down, but you can read about the whole selling your house right before a pandemic story here). 

So now I have a room to re-do.  Because of all the stay at home orders and this whole deadly pandemic thing, the theme is sort of a DIY and use what you have type theme depending on location and what’s going on due to Covid…also due to Covid, the ORC has been extended to 8 weeks.  Which is nice since we just moved into our house two days ago, and it’s still filled with boxes.

I am going to be transforming our living room and dining room and maybe the entry way…depending on how much time I have and how long I can lock the three children outside. 

Before

The house was built in 1928 and is a Folk Victorian house.  (fancy talk for a poor persons Victorian because it ain’t got no  frou frou stuff going on).

It might not have frou frou stuff going on, but it has arched built in bookcases and a tiny fireplace, so I was sold. 

Few rules for designing this house: Needs to be semi-budget friendly, since it will eventually be a rental.  Since it’s going to be a rental, I’m trying to go with colors a large majority of people don’t hate, because I don’t want to repaint 14 times.  I’m going to try to re-purpose and re-use as many items as I can for these spaces. 

Dining Room Before

Our last house was very modern, so it’s going to be a fun challenge to take items out of modern and put it into an old space. 

I’ve been super into blue and red as a color combo  for the past few months, so I decided to run with it.

Below is a mood board for the living room. 

It’s a crap shoot if any of it actually turns out like the picture, because a lot of samples I need for the project are delayed because of Covid (how dare these people delay production for their safety) so I don’t know if I’ll be able to order what I need.

A lowdown on the pic: We own the couch and the two chairs, the brown chair will be reupholstered. The rug was in our master bedroom in our old house, and is gonna make a primetime appearance. The rest is all up in the air.

The dining room is connected to the living room via a 5’ wide arched doorway (yay for arches!) and will sort of go with the theme, because can you have too many themes?

I found a table on FB marketplace for $40 that I’m going to sand down and paint a high gloss blue (table in pic just for inspiration). Some potential fabric for curtains, and we’re going to re-use our media console from our TV room as our new bar. (somehow the liquor got unpacked prior to the kids toothbrushes). We are going to re-use our cesca chairs and pair modern with old.

If you want to follow along as we go on this journey, click below to sign up and get on our email list.

You can also go to the One Room Challenge website and follow along with the 20 featured designers or hundreds of guest participants like me!

To see following weeks, click on the links: (To see where we started, click here: Week Two, Week Three, Week Four, Week Six, Week Seven,