The Spring One Room Challenge is finally here! If you’re not familiar, the One Room Challenge is a room makeover contest hosted by Linda of Calling It Home and Better Homes & Gardens. 20 Featured Participants blog about their experience redesigning their space, as well as hundreds of Guest Participants (that’s me!). Due to Coronavirus and the ensuing craziness, the start date was postponed for five weeks, which makes total sense. I expected to start early anyway and work through April to get a jump on things, but to be honest, I’m not that far ahead of schedule. I still have a LOT of work to do. Also, because of Coronavirus, the normal six week time frame has been extended to eight weeks this time around. That works out well for me, because I’m tackling some DIY projects I’ve never attempted before, so the more time I have, the better! I haven’t participated since my first (and only) ORC in Fall of 2017, so I’m extra pumped to dive back in with the new house and give my daughter the bedroom of her dreams.

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As I mentioned in this post about Arabella’s room at our last house, she has very strong opinions about her bedroom design. I wanted to go in a different direction (Kate Spade-esque/Palm Beach inspired), but she INSISTED on an all pink room. I love pink as much (or WAY more than) the next gal, but even to me, an all pink room sounded a bit over the top. After some discussion, it became clear that she wasn’t changing her mind, so I quickly began brainstorming ideas to make an all pink room sophisticated. Is that even a thing? Hmmm, I guess we’ll find out, right?!

We started with a pretty blank slate, so we’ve got a long way to go to give my girl her all pink bedroom. The first element Arabella and I agreed on was an accent wall with either a fun graphic wallpaper or a mural. Of course, we didn’t envision the same thing for that wall feature, but after looking and looking (and looking some more), we finally agreed on this stunner from Vinilyc Stickers Shop on Etsy.

Maxim from Vinilyc Stickers Shop sponsored my ORC and generously gifted us this beautiful wall mural. Installing it is one of the few completed parts of my One Room Challenge, and I couldn’t be more impressed with this product. More details on and tips on installing this beauty to come soon!

My stance on kids’ rooms is that I get the final say, but I try to give them as much input as possible. When I began searching “sophisticated pink rooms” on Pinterest, one thing quickly leapt out at me. ALL of the rooms I was drawn to had architectural moldings. Crown at the very least, but most of them also had chair rail and/or picture frame moldings of some type.

I’ve always been enamored with the idea of moldings… They add so much visual interest, they are timeless if done well, and they are the perfect compliment for my eclectic glam decorating style. However, I’ve never done anything like this, so it seems like a pretty scary project to tackle. I tried to talk myself out of it…

But anyone who knows me well knows that once I get an idea in my head, I’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen. Case in point: sewing an uber complicated custom slipcover for my existing brown glider rocker to achieve the more feminine look I wanted for Arabella’s nursery. While 8 months pregnant. That was a bad, and literally painful, move. Adam tried to talk me into giving it up multiple times during the project because I was SO miserable. But I wasn’t going to let my 80+ hours of work and $350 worth of materials go to waste. So I finished. And it was beautiful. Although in hindsight, it would have been much easier to sell the existing glider and purchase a new one. Delayed intelligence at its finest! So this could get exciting, but I’ll be tackling crown molding, chair rail, and picture frame molding in this Modern European Girls Bedroom design.

I always planned on painting some old bookcases my parents used to have at their lakehome that had been passed down to my sister and repurposing them for Arabella’s room, but the picture above gave me the brilliant (if I do say so myself) idea to turn them into builtins. I’ve been working on that, and it’s a lot of work, but I think they’re going to turn out great. Stay tuned for more details on that as well!

After pulling all of the ideas together, as well as the pink “shell” bed Arabella had her heart set on, this is the concept board I came up with. There may be a few tweaks along the way, but for now, this is the plan. I hope you’ll follow along as I transform Arabella’s room into something fabulous, and don’t forget to check out the featured designers and guest participants rooms!

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4 | Week 5 | Week 6 | Week 7 | Week 8