One Room Challenge Week 1: Powder Bathroom Plans

Hello! Today I am excited to share I will be joining in as a guest designer for my very first One Room Challenge! If you haven’t heard of the ORC, it is a bi-annual event showcasing 20 designers and guest participants as they transform one room of their home. Starting today, every week for the next six weeks, everyone will share their progress and updates on the room!

If you are here from the One Room Challenge site, welcome! I’m Zahra, and I am so excited to be joining in as a guest this season. My design philosophy is that every great room should consist of four things: Something old, something new, something vintage, and something uniquely you.

I first learned of this challenge from one of my favorite interior design bloggers, Alisa Bovino – I followed along as she did one of her rooms and it was so much fun to see the process, that I thought I would try to do it too!

The room I chose to makeover is our powder bathroom. A little background: our home was built in 1916, and even though it has been renovated, details like the brick chimney and original hardwood floors have (thankfully) been preserved. This makeover is not a full renovation job, thank goodness, don’t think we’d be able to handle that right at the moment! But if you are in the thick of it I hope you’ve planned out everything that you need to, as even the smallest thing is important. We had friends recently re-do their bathroom and the pipe situation got a little messed up and they had to call in a plumbing repair in Port St. Lucie service. There was a lot going on!

Here is the before:

First, what I love about the room is that it has the gorgeous brick from the original fireplace, it is pretty spacious (albeit narrow) for a powder bath, and I appreciate the original doors and hardwood floors and trim.

My vision for this space is to make it a bold statement. A few years ago I visited New Orleans and I fell so deep in love – the art, music, food! Most of all, I fell in love with their style – the mix of traditional and whimsical, old and new, glamorous and eclectic. I want my entire home to feel like that – one day! It definitely will happen, but I don’t want to put a time stamp on it just yet. I have a lot of things that I need to get organized first before I can think about renovating the rest of the home.

I’ve always wanted to renovate our other bathroom. There is nothing particularly wrong with it, but I just think it could do with a bit of revamping if you know what I mean. Take my shower, for instance. I love a shower but it is not very visually appealing. It wasn’t until I saw my friend’s new shower glass doors, that she got from somewhere like http://www.glasscraftersinc.com/ that I actually thought about renovating this room. They just did something to the space that is hard to describe and I would love to see that in my own home one day. Until that time comes, we will place all our focus on the powder bath.

My first step will be to swap out the pedestal sink for a vanity with more of a vintage vibe, and I know I’ll have to get a helping hand from a service such as MetroPHA with installing this as it’s certainly not something I can do myself, I’m just planning out the new designs I want! I want there to be a mix of metals, including brass. I will also change the wallpaper to something with a little more of a bold story. At the moment, I’m thinking of putting up tiles to brighten up the space a bit more but I’ll have to buy tiles, filler, grout, grout sealer, etc. so I don’t know if it’ll get done in time. We’ll have to see! In the end I hope it will be a little masculine, a little feminine, and overall a lot more interesting.

Here is mood board I created with the actual wallpaper and mirror I plan to use. The framed pictures I picked up from a street artist during my visit to New Orleans.