Wow, it’s that time of year again already…time for the One Room Challenge! AKA the ORC, the One Room Challenge is a highlight of the season and a motivator to get. stuff. done. If you’ve never heard of it, read on, or if you are already familiar with it skip down to find out what we are tackling this time!

What is the One Room Challenge?

The One Room Challenge is a biannual challenge for interior designers and design enthusiasts to complete a space in only 8 weeks.  It used to be 6…but current conditions make 8 a bit more doable - and it used to be start to finish in the time window, but now you are allowed to get a jump on the project early since scheduling and ordering are currently such a crapshoot!  

Of course, I did NOT really get a start ahead of time except to reach out to contractors, so who knows if I’ll be able to actually pull this off, but the suspense is part of the fun!

The ORC is in its 20th season and was pioneered by Linda Weinstein to motivate she and a handful of blogger friends to finally get projects in their own homes accomplished, celebrating and cheering each other on in the process.

The spirit of that original intent lives on, and the community of people involved is super supportive and encouraging.  But now the event has grown to over 200 participants each round including a small group of featured designers alongside a hoard of guest participants.  The featured designers are sponsored by a bevy of brands, and Better Homes and Gardens is the official media sponsor of the whole shebang.  

The ORC is open to anyone with a blog (or now, an IG account) and encourages weekly posts documenting the progress and pitfalls of the project.  The first post is due this week and the final reveals will be posted by the deadline of November 21st.  

Check in on the ORC page each week on Wednesdays to see the featured designer posts, and Thursdays to see the guest posts! 

About Me

If you have come here from the ORC page, let me introduce myself!  I’m Janet, a designer and blogger in the greater Boston area in the (currently chilly) northeast.  I have an addiction to tea, a love affair with classic design, a serious loathing of fluorescent lighting and plastic cutlery, and a passion for cooking and entertaining family and friends.  I believe good design supports and enables a life of flourishing…and that good design is for everyone.

My Fall 2021 ORC

This will be my 4th time participating in the ORC.  You can see the reveal posts from our previous challenges: the Vintage Diva Glamour Den (a bedroom makeover), the Overdue Office Overhaul, and the Pocket Patio Project.

This time, I am taking on my master suite dressing area and closet with operation: Dressing Room Do-Over.

A supremely well organized closet has been on my wish list for years.  Like all well designed things, it would make what is currently an inefficient and time consuming trial into a pleasure!

Even though I acquired sole custody of 13’ of closet when I divorced, it was still not efficient or easy to use.  Over the years, I have maintained a closet stuffed with sizes spanning 9 sizes and a lot of one-size-fits-all (which is never true, BTW) depending on my weight, but I have, in the last 2 years managed to streamline my size range, so it is time to celebrate with a wonderful dressing room!

To begin, as with all client projects, we start with a wish list and an assessment of what we loathe and what we love about the space. Here’s what is on MY lists:

Wish List

• Specialized easy storage for scarfs and jewelry

• Easier shoe storage

• Better sweater storage

• A dedicated space for luggage

• Rods at the right heights for longer skirts, jackets, and dresses

• Functional and pretty closet doors

• Seating/ottoman

• Window treatments

• Floor space for exercise

If this bleeds over into the rest of the bedroom, I might add new nightstands with charging plugs, new pillows, reupholstered seating, and new lamps to the list! And while we’re dreaming, the ensuite bath desperately needs an overhaul…but alas, that is a project for another time!

Things I love

• A pretty full length mirror

• The flower shape of the current ottoman

• The hand painted tall dresser

• The hardwood floors

• The wall paint color - a perfect complex shade of blue-green called Palladian Blue from Benjamin Moore

Things that drive me nuts

• The bifold closet doors - these stick constantly and cumulatively block a good 4’ of the closet when open.

• The leaning tower of cardboard shoe cubbies

• Scarves and sweaters taking up precious closet rod space

• Jewelry scattered all over the place

• The stucco textured closet interior that will peel the skin off knuckles (I have words for the builder that thought this was a good idea).  

• The pretty shaped ottoman with the dated fabric that is such a piece-of-crap furniture, you can’t sit on it without the legs breaking - it currently is only good for holding clothes, lightweight ones

• The floodwater curtain panels - I washed them and they shrunk so they are a few inches off the floor and the lining hangs below them - I should have know better (insert eye roll here), but I was younger and more foolish at the time.

A little backstory…

This dressing room side of the master suite was the original master bedroom, which contained one 5’ closet.  Since we planned on having kids and we would probably need their closets for THEIR clothes rather than the overflow of ours, we added onto the back of the house to enlarge the master suite. 

This yielded a bonus space below with an outside entrance (now my office as seen in the Overdue Office Overhaul), a master bathroom you could turn around in and that was NOT harvest gold (the original 5’ x 5’ one you could brush your teeth in the sink while sitting on the toilet…TMI?), and the glorious addition of a double closet 13’ long.

The closet was ‘organized’ with one long rod across the whole span and an additional lower rod on either end.  I hated the sliding doors on the other closets, so I opted for bifold doors on this one.  Huge mistake, and one I have wrestled with, literally, for the last 30+ years!

If I fix nothing else but those doors, this ORC will be a success.

The current state of the Dressing Room

Are you ready to see pictures of the current state of affairs??  It’s hugely embarrassing, but hey, that’s what I signed up for! You can tell what era this was done by the giant looming recessed floods LOL. I hope to update those at some point, but probably not in this round of fixes - there are too many other more pressing problems to address!

I can’t wait to see this project underway…it is going to be SOOOOO nice to have it done!

Be sure to check out the rest of the ORC posts to get inspired HERE! Next week, I’ll share my plan for the closet redesign - be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the fun!