Hi everyone! It has been a couple of weeks since our last blog post and we have been busier than ever working on multiple rooms. If you remember, we asked our readers last month to decide whether or not we should build a loft in our son’s bedroom. I was 99% sure that the pro-loft voters would prevail, but it was not at all the blowout vote that I expected it to be. People don’t believe me when I tell them that we have no control over which way the vote goes. We are really not tech-savvy enough to control the voting plugin that we use (if that is even possible) and just like all of you, we only get one vote per personal device. Sometimes, we are at home biting our nails and just hoping that the vote goes the way we want it to. Truthfully, it doesn’t always and that’s actually part of the fun! This time, we were very much Team Loft and were so excited to get started on the project.

I am sure you would like to see the progress that has been made in the room so far, so without further ado…

As soon as the votes were in, Ronan got to work on framing the loft. We decided pretty early on that it was a priority of ours to keep the room feeling bright and light and we didn’t want the loft to weigh the room down too much. We thought that one way of achieving this was to add a little shelving unit into the side of the loft base. We also liked the idea that with the open shelving there, if you looked into the room from down the hall, you wouldn’t be looking at a solid wall and there would still be a path for all of the natural light to shine toward the door.

Once the slow parts of the job were over, things moved along pretty quickly from the photo above to…

This!!

I still can’t get over how beautiful the floors turned out. If you need a reminder of what they looked like before the work in this room started, check out this post from a little over a month ago.

It’s a bit hard to picture without the railings, but I hope that even if you voted against the loft, after seeing it you totally want to climb up there and play like we do. It just looks like so much fun and if we feel that way, I can’t imagine what it feels like to a child! I couldn’t even resist getting my pregnant self up onto the loft to check out the views. (It was so worth it!)

Remember that I mentioned I had been obsessing over looking into closet designs on Pinterest? Well, it seemed to me like this was the best choice for a kid’s room and Ronan executed it perfectly! It is going to be used to hold our son’s clothes that need to hang, as well as most of his toys. It will be so nice to be able to see all of his things in one spot (and then close the doors and hide whatever he is not playing with!)

The smallish opening above the closet is a storage area. It doesn’t lead into the attic, but it is just a nice clean space where we plan on storing things that we don’t need to access often, but would rather not store in our 200-year-old basement.

Here is a picture from below the loft space looking toward our favorite twin windows. As you can see, we left some of the old beams exposed in the corner. While that was intentional, there are a few other issues in this photo that need to be addressed. See how the left window is open? That’s permanent right now because Ronan was demonstrating for me how awesome it is that the windows can actually be lowered from the top to let in fresh air instead of from the bottom. He was just getting to the good part about “so even if it’s raining outside, you can just open them this way and the rain won’t even come in!” when he realized that the window wasn’t capable of closing again. Now, it is locked in that position until we figure out how to fix it. Whoops! Another issue that will be dealt with pretty soon is hooking up the radiator so that the big orange pipe isn’t sticking out of the floor.

Our Drastic Plan to Finish this Room

As soon as the bedroom was at the point that furniture could be placed in it without endangering anyone or anything, we moved our son and his things out of his old room and into this room. We needed to do that so that we could begin working on the nursery ASAP (don’t judge us when I say we are currently about 30 days away from our due date!) We decorated some of the walls with his things and made his bed and brought a bunch of his toys in and he totally loves it, but there is a problem- the room isn’t technically finished. When I say not “technically” finished, I am being pretty generous. It doesn’t have lights installed yet, or closet doors, or a regular door into the room for that matter. We still need to build a ladder to go into the loft and we need to put railings on the loft so that our son can play up there safely. Right now, the loft is full of things that need to go into the nursery, but can’t yet because it is not done. (Are you getting stressed out for us yet?)

So, drastic times call for drastic measures and as a result of this situation, we have decided to participate in something that intimidates me big time! It is called the One Room Challenge and it is a design challenge that some of my favorite home bloggers, as well as many big-name designers, participate in twice a year. Anyone can join the 5-week challenge and your only obligations are to design a room and post an update of some sort on your progress once a week. If you don’t finish the room, there is absolutely no punishment. Seems easy enough, right? The problem is that I have always wanted to post more than we currently do, but have never managed to get on a once-a-week schedule so I am not sure if I will be able to make it happen now either. The other problem is that somewhere in those five weeks a brand new tiny human will probably be joining our family and require quiteeee a bit of attention. Oh, and the last problem is that we really need to focus a lot of attention on working on the nursery because Ronan has already demoed the room and is spending every night working to put it back together. Things are pretty crazy!

However, I think that this challenge is just what we need to force us to completely finish our son’s room. It is so close to being a room we are in love with and we have a pretty clear vision of what we want it to look like once it is done, so before we lose that vision, we need to just do it! Now, let’s see if we can hold ourselves to it.

Next week, if all goes as planned, we will post an update about our design plan for the room. I am going to try to include a vote in that post, we just need to decide which decision we would like our readers to vote on. Maybe a paint color? That might be fun…

Don’t forget to check back next week and in the meantime, check out the amazing designers and guest participants on the One Room Challenge Website. As always, thanks so much for following along on our renovation journey!