The Avian Angle

Hello friends!

Have you ever put yourself out there to try something 100% new? Well this is my very first attempt at the One Room Challenge and I am so glad to have you follow along in this journey because quite frankly I am scared to do it at all! You might be asking what is the One Room Challenge and I will be sure to get to that, but I want to start with my own perspective.

I have lived in my house for 6 years. When I bought this 863 square foot bungalow in the middle of Sacramento’s downtown grid, I was 1) overjoyed to call something my own and 2) a little scared that I was embarking into a lifelong commitment of house projects. My beauty of a bungalow was built in 1920 and is 100 years old this year (2020!).

Some of you that know me and my family know that we are generally crafty and handy people. My dad and uncle back experience in electrical, construction, engineering, woodwork, and much much more. So yes, I am thankful that I have grown up in a family that is self-taught and learners when it comes to figuring out or tinkering until something gets made or crafted to a finished product or look. That said, I am still a handywoman-in-training. I have absorbed from my family what I know, but doing projects on my own (like using a circular saw for the first time by myself) challenges me and pushes me to figure things out on my own.

All that said, I have more recently started doing projects on my own with less help from my family. My husband and I replaced our kitchen faucet together – on our own! I half thought water was going to start spewing every where but we made it through that project without a splash. We’ve cut our counter top with that circular saw and made it through all that adrenaline. Most recently, we’ve repainted our entire house which has given us a blank slate for our bathroom remodel. The rest of the house is a beautiful mauve color that took us weeks to pick out and that we love now!

However the bathroom, we decided to paint all white as a fresh clean slate to start re-designing it from scratch. Now, we have an old house and therefore old features in our bathroom, including a claw foot tub and an old medicine cabinet. We are going to do a full bathroom remodel where we put in a shower some day but not this year. With this project, we are going to give this bathroom a little bit of a face lift, which helps immensely for both some of the functional things we want to see changed and aesthetically. I’m calling this a remodel, not a renovation for that purpose.

So, how does this bathroom remodel project fit into this One Room Challenge? Well the One Room Challenge is a 6-week challenge twice a year (typically April – May this year due to health and safety concerns – and October). I know I won’t be able to do the October challenge so I am focusing all of my remodel efforts this May. The ORC is supposed to bring designers and DIYers together to not compete but cheer each other on in their interior or home projects and to really see them to completion. Participants can start their projects however early they need to but they need to feature and finish the project by the end of the 6th week (this year due to health and safety concerns they are allowing 8 weeks to finish projects). Lots of participants do their projects within the 6 weeks because who really has time to work on a project for longer than that?! I am guest participant this year and am so excited  to push myself to finish. Like most creatives,  I have lots of projects and sometimes its hard to see them to the finish line. I am determined on this one and have some more challenging parts of this project that I am very nervous about but am hoping they turn out well.

I will be sharing more as I move forward with the ORC, including how I have planned in advance for this project and the challenges that I stumble into along the way to hopefully a beautiful new bathroom.

To view more room renovations from the official One Room Challenge blog, please visit:

www.oneroomchallenge.com/orc-blog