To quote my girl Liz Lemon —- “It’s all Happening!!!”

This fall is a big move forward for me and Hilltown House as I’ve decided to branch out by joining an amazing group of fellow bloggers and becoming a Guest Participant in the One Room Challenge hosted by Linda at Calling it Home and in partnership with House Beautiful.  In the next 6 weeks a group of over 200 guest and 20 featured bloggers will take the challenge to transform one room in their homes and share their progress – and I’m so excited to join them this time around!  At the end of the Spring Challenge I spent a good amount of time going through every final reveal and it was incredibly inspiring – so much that I immediately began making plans to join them in the fall.

The one room that has been severely neglected is our Guest Bedroom – besides replacing the carpet with laminate when we re-did all of the floors, this room is still basically an empty box that my husband sleeps in when he has to leave early for work (or when the dog is snoring too loud).  Besides that, this room doesn’t get used very often, but instead of seeing that as a reason to ignore it I see it as a reason to have some fun and take some chances – which takes me to my design plan:

My first iteration of this room was much closer to that of my powder room, and for a long time I was really attached to using the same Bee Stencil for the upper portion of the walls, but it all started to look too serious.  Instead, I am going to take a big departure from the rest of the house and use a bold color on the walls (Sherwin Williams Halcyon Green) and then balance it with a lot of neutrals.  As usual, I plan on building a lot of elements, mixing in a lot that I already have, and finishing with some quirky art and some amenities tailored just for guests.

I really didn’t mean for my Before Pic to be so bad but this is the only one I could find from about a month after we moved in – poor little neglected room!

Right now this room is pretty much just storage for all my One Week Challenge goodies and some random husband stuff.  It’s not the largest room, and you can see it has a little “entryway” on one side that you can see from the loft so space planning is going to be really important.

I started painting so I could start on one of the projects I’m most excited about – the faux fireplace!

At first I wanted to try to find an antique mantel to hang, but since we wanted to install a TV above it building one that can accommodate some hidden compartments to hide all of the cords and gadgets made the most sense.  This is the part of the room I’m honestly most worried about executing so getting it out of the way Week One will be amazing.  So far we mounted our new TV and hid the cords in the wall (YoungHouseLove has a wonderful tutorial with links to all the products you could need – it’s not the easiest task, especially if your wall has insulation, but it’s worth the extra effort). BONUS – it’s turned into a great place to store all my tools!

Other than the fireplace, my goal is to get all of the trim installed, caulked, and painted by this time next week.  We replaced the carpet with laminate about 2 years ago (we used Pergo wide plank laminate in Riverbend Oak), and I was motivated enough to put up the door trim, but never got around to getting the floor baseboard back on – whoops.

I decided to use a board and batten style trim on the bottom 2/3ds of the wall to tie this room into some of the other spaces in the house.  To make it work I am using a combination of 1/4″ MDF board and pre-primed MDF boards (which is what I’ve used for all of my house trim).  So far so good, but I’m trying not to think of  the crazy amount of work still needed to check this item off the list.

Somewhere in this whole thing I need to also schedule time to check out everyone else’s project because isn’t that the best part!….you can play along at home too by catching up each Thursday on the Calling it Home One Week Challenge Blog where all of the guest and featured participants will be sharing their progress.

In my mind 6 weeks is enough time to finish everything – but ask me come week 5 if I still feel the same way LOL.  After a month of staring at a laptop for 12 – 16 hours a day I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to spending time in my workshop and getting my hands dirty.  I hope the husband doesn’t mind getting displaced for a few weeks ; )

For more progress pics and Insta-story nonsense be sure to follow me on Instagram