Master Makeover – ORC Week 2

It’s week 2 of the One Room Challenge, hosted by Linda at Calling it Home, and if you missed last week’s introduction to our master bedroom, go back and check it out here, because you’ll see none of that blue and carpeted bedroom in today’s post. You will, however, see the official mood board, so stick it out through the reno picks for some pretty at the bottom!

We spent the week ceiling scraping, carpet ripping, and just generally destroying our home in the best way. You may recall from last week that we were eager/anxious to see what lay beneath the carpet, and I’m happy to report that the prognosis for the original wood flooring is mostly good. There is a small bit of complicating news, which I’ll get to in a minute, but first let me walk you through the progress.

Step 1 involved scraping the ceiling while the carpet was still in place. I wondered whether scraping would be as easy as it looks in videos, but I found that it truly isn’t that difficult. The key to scraping is to get the popcorn exactly the right amount of wet. Too wet and you can gouge the drywall, not wet enough and you won’t get the surface smooth. This was our first time with this process, so it took some trial and error to figure out what wet enough was, but we got the hang of it,the work went pretty quickly, and the look of the smooth ceilings was good motivation.

It was nearly heavenly, in fact.

Step 2 was tearing up the carpet and padding to reveal the hardwoods! Here’s a shot of the cleared room.

The floors are dirty for sure with plenty of paint and drywall dust, and it’s also easy to see where the walls were pushed back at some point. The lines where there is no stain on the floor show the original dimensions, and the doorway was very close to where I took this picture–the original room was tiny! On the whole, though, the floors are in really, really good shape for refinishing. The only small problem is that someone “forgot” to extend the wood flooring into the closets. Instead, they screwed down plywood and other random types of boards. We consulted a flooring guy who said we can use new red oak flooring to pretty well match our old Douglass fir boards, but the guy himself declined to take on the potentially tedious patch job. Never fear, though, my intrepid husband immediately said he’d try his hand at it and has already started laying boards. So far it’s going well, so check back next week to see where the saga takes us next.

I showed my original inspiration photo last week, and here’s how I’m interpreting it for our room.

I’m trying to keep these posts snappy, since I know there’s a lot of One Room Challenge goodness to enjoy and only so many hours in everyone’s week, so next week I’ll go more in-depth on the design plan and sources for the items pictured (if you can’t wait until next week, though, just leave me a comment!).

Now get on over to Calling It Home and check out the other participants’ progress!