Jewel Tone Craft Studio Makeover – One Room Challenge Week 1

What would your home look like if you focused on making over one room with laser focus for six weeks?

I’m thinking that kind of focus would help me actually complete a room makeover as opposed to jumping around between every room in my house. What room in your home needs a makeover, anyway?

Today is the first week of the One Room Challenge, a really neat event hosted by Linda at Calling It Home. I’ve decided to join the party and will be one of dozens of bloggers working hard to make over one room in the next six weeks. We will all share updates each Thursday, eventually revealing our room transformations in week 6. Who’s excited? I know I am!

I’ve decided to tackle my soon-to-be craft studio, the room I have been itching to get done since we moved in last November. Here’s the embarrassing before photo:

We moved into our first home last November, and I have been sooo good at sticking to my plan to not spend any effort on our basement right away. If you couldn’t tell, this craft studio is in our basement.

Reasons Our Basement Has Been On Hold

Reason #1: I needed to focus my decorating efforts on the main floor first, where we spend most of our time.

Reason #2: We moved from an apartment so we don’t have extra furniture to fill a basement, so putting the basement on hold was an effort to prevent me from going out and buying up a bunch of stuff just to fill space.

Reason #3: We wanted to make sure the basement wouldn’t get wet or flood or anything like that.

Reason #4: An empty basement gave me so much room to store boxes I still haven’t unpacked. 🙂

The Soon-To-Be Craft Studio

The stairs to our basement go into a rec. room, which will be nice someday. Then there’s a huge laundry/furnace/storage room. And the third room downstairs is this odd room. To make it sound fancy, you could call it a bonus room. To make our little basement sound extra fancy, I should tell you it’s a walkout basement. Pretty cool, huh?

I’m not really sure what this room’s purpose is supposed to be. We’ve speculated that it was originally a one-car garage built under the house, or maybe it was just a cellar type place to store veggies, or maybe a workshop. I’m not sure, but I immediately knew it was going to be my future craft studio. With a drain in the floor, cement floors that would be okay to get dirty, and a door leading directly to the backyard (perfect for spray painting), I decided this would be my future craft studio. Also, the room oddly had an old-school pencil sharpener on the wall…maybe it was once a creepy home school room with red floor?

Here’s what it looked like on move-in day last November:

I hated that red floor so much, so this spring I spontaneously decided it needed repainting. After picking up a gallon of cement floor paint, I set out to mop it clean so I could roll on a fresh coat of paint. Unfortunately, that project turned into a much bigger ordeal. The short story is the red paint started bubbling up all over the place, so I ended up on my hands and knees scraping it all off the floor while breathing in fumes from paint thinner and cement degreaser. Yuck. After that, I avoided the room all summer, leaving it looking horrendous:

When my sisters were visiting a couple weeks ago to help me paint my living room, I decided to get a jump start on the One Room Challenge and we painted a new coat of paint on the cement floor in craft studio. It is looking so much better now!

I am extremely excited to make this room into my own work space. I’m going to leave the walls white, add a huge work table in the center, add shelving along the walls, add better lighting, and hang curtains in front of the existing storage shelves. With the bulk of the walls and furniture being neutral, I’m hoping to add in lots of fun pops of colorful accessories.

Here’s the mood board I dreamed up for this space:

Mood Board Image Sources: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

I am beyond excited to tackle this room and turn it into my happy place. It looks pretty rough now, but I have a big vision for this space and I’m so ready to make it a reality. I’ll check back in next week to show you my progress.

Do you like the colors I chose? What is your must-have craft room accessory? Comment below with your ideas for this room!

> Go check out what all of the other bloggers have planned for their room makeovers.