One Room Challenge Spring 2021

One Room Challenge Week 1: The Concept

Today we're doing something a little different here on the blog. Blogging "challenges" are not a new concept - from capsule wardrobes to room reimaginations - but I've only participated in a few throughout my blogging journey.

This week and the following 5 weeks, I'm excited to be participating in the 19th annual One Room Challenge presented by Better Homes and Gardens. It's a home renovation concept that shows the progress of a room from start to finish over the course of 6 weeks. For so many reasons I have had this on my blogging calendar for the last few months and as you've seen over on social media and this blog post we've already started on the room I'm going to be featuring for this challenge.


If you're new here or just stumbled across the blog from the One Room Challenge website, I'm Emily, writer, photographer, and creative behind this blog and a few other pet projects.

My husband and I bought a 1979 Cape Cod style home in Greenville, SC in April 2019 and promptly spent the next 3 months gutting most of the living spaces and bedrooms. We moved in June 2019, and have been slowly working on the house ever since.

Over the last few weeks we've started to tackle our living room renovation and have decided to completely reimagine the space from what it was when we bought the home and what it has been the past 2 years.

Today's post will be a bit of introduction to the project and every Wednesday over the next 5 weeks will be detailed stories on our progress and finally the finished room.

This post details the before look at the living room when we bought the house but I wanted to re-share our 3D model concept of the space so you get an idea of what the final look will be.

Bookshelves model

Because I'm cheating a little bit for this challenge (you're technically supposed to start the project at the beginning of week) we already have quite a few of the design decisions finalized – like a dark moody green for the bookcases - but over the next few weeks I'll walk you through our process for choosing them and how we muddle through decisions as novice home reno humans.

This has been a very time consuming process and while we're hoping to be finished by the end of May and the end of the challenge, it's hard to say what unpredictable South Carolina weather will throw at us and a very busy month ahead. But we're excited to have a finished living room and a mounted TV at the end of the process and hope you all will enjoy following along!

I post quite a bit behind the scenes on Instagram and Pinterest if you want to follow me over there for a bit more day to day content!

Find more rooms remodels on the One Room Challenge blog.

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