One Room Challenge - A Young Manly Makeover

I mentioned earlier this summer that I've been taking on some interior design/decorating projects, in between traveling to teach all over the country and in my studio, and working on a new book, because sleep is over rated! Ha!! Plus I'm having a blast and have been working on a line of hand printed textile designs that I'm unleashing on the world.

One of these decorating/design projects is a whole house redesign that I'm project managing (handling the contractor, electrician, plumber, inspections, etc for a bathroom addition and kitchen remodeling/redesign) and planning the interiors for every room, integrating existing furniture with new furniture, updating finishes, and bringing cohesion with a new, fresh style to the house, a style that we're calling "organic modern industrial". This week I am starting on a bedroom for the son of the family, a delightful 20 year old who's off at college and needs an updated room to come home to on holidays, a room that guests will also feel comfortable in.

I have followed the One Room Challenge (ORC), a six week blogging design challenge dreamed up and hosted by Linda of Calling It Home, and have always thought about participating. Twenty well known design bloggers are invited to make over one room in their houses (in six fast action-packed weeks!) and they blog about their progress each Wednesday. Anyone else who'd like to play along can link up and blog on Thursdays so I decided to jump in and work on "A Young Manly Makeover", the 20 year old college athlete's room, for my first spin at the ORC.

Currently the room is painted a bright shade of Kermit-the-Frog green and has spray-painted graffiti designs on two walls. Some of the furniture (that isn't staying) has already been removed. Luckily there are a few excellent pieces of furniture that are staying - two mid-century modern nightstands, a curved painted dresser (that will be getting a makeover itself), a mattress and boxspring on a metal bed frame (but no headboard), and a mid-century modern desk. Great building blocks to start with! The mandate is to create a cozy modern room that's updated with a new color palette for a young man; to keep it masculine and warm; to reuse the family's mid-mod furniture; and to stick to a budget - so I'll be building and hacking a few things to stay on track.

Here are the before photos of the room:

First up, we need a plan! I put together a moodboard to give the family an idea of how the room could look. Most of the items on the moodboard are suggestions of the look and feel we're going for, although I have started to source a few things exactly, like the pictured brushed gold lamps for the nightstands. They're from Target and if you love them as much as I do, don't wait to order them because they're disappearing from stores and from the Target app so their days are numbered. *sniff*

I hope you follow along to see how the room progresses! It's going to be challenging because this month I'm also preparing to teach in Houston, Texas at the end of October - a week's worth of workshops, including How to Film and Edit Your Own Videos, Social Media Bootcamp, and How to Get Published. It's going to be a wild ride!!