One Room Challenge Week 5- Crown molding, furniture, and a DIY disaster!

It’s not evident on first glance, but the photo above has SO many details and projects that I accomplished over the weekend for the One Room Challenge, like crown molding, the ceiling fan, and furniture. I packed a lot into the long holiday weekend- it was nice to have three full days to work on the finer details in the office, and accomplish a DIY disaster…more on that below! (Catch up on previous blog posts here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, and Week 4).

Let’s break down what I accomplished:

//Crown molding

We installed crown molding in my daughter Emma’s room a few months ago, and it was a very challenging project. Challenging as in it took at least a day for us to figure out how in the world to cut the crown molding. Crown molding is very deceiving. It looks SO pretty and provides a very polished, finished look to any room, but man, it is a tough learning curve. To be honest, I can’t say I actually felt like I knew what I was doing even after we did the crown molding in Emma’s room! What made it complicated this time was we tried to use a jig. There are several jigs on the market and I should have purchased this Kreg crown molding jig, but I purchased this one from Home Depot instead.

Mistakes were made….what we didn’t realize is that you have to set the jig to account for the spring angle of the crown molding. The spring angle is the angle at which the crown molding juts out from the wall. The jig we purchased only has the ability to handle three different spring angles and our crown molding happened to be a non-standard spring angle. So we wasted many pieces of crown molding until we realized the jig wasn’t going to work. The Kreg jig can handle just about any spring angle, which is why I should’ve purchased that one!

However, now I feel like I have a much better handle on cutting crown molding. So much so that I probably won’t even bother to buy the Kreg jig. There are several ways to cut crown molding without a jig and this time, we tried coping the inside corner joints instead of using miter cuts. I followed this guide and this YouTube video, and used this coping saw.

Coping was a lot harder than all the YouTube videos make it look like! It took me several times to take enough material off the crown molding to get it to fit snugly into the corner.

II love the end result after I used a little wood filler and caulk:

Coping works wonders for wonky corners because let’s face it, who has perfect 90 degree corners in every room of their house?!

//Ceiling fan

Don’t you love the unique ceiling fan? It’s the Lindsay from Matthews Fan Company. I found this company on Instagram a few months ago while I was finalizing my design plans for the office. I fell in love with their ceiling fans- they are all unique and actually look good! I’ve never met a ceiling fan that I love until I found Matthews Fan Company.

I took a leap of faith and reached out to the company on Instagram about doing a collaboration for the office. And you know what? They believed in me and my design plans and gifted me the Lindsay to use in the office! To say I am thrilled is an understatement. It is so heart warming to me that a company like Matthews Fan Company would trust me to showcase their fan and partner with them. I am truly thankful, and everyone I have interacted with at Matthews Fan Company has been absolutely wonderful. I can actually say from experience that this company is customer and quality centric. I hope you’ll check out their line of fans– the designs are incredible and unique. Trust me, it’ll make you actually want a ceiling fan, which is usually not everyone’s first choice for a fixture!

//Furniture and DIY disaster

If you’ve been following along on Instagram, you know that I ordered a chair I’ve been wanting forever from Target when it came back in stock several weeks ago. Tragically, the chair never shipped! I called Target and they said that the chair may or may not randomly show up at my house…their customer service is amazing because they gave me a full refund without any question. So maybe I’ll get a free chair, but I need one NOW, not at an unknown future time! Anyways…all of the links for the furniture I ordered are on LiketoKnowIt here so you can see all of the exact items.

Ok…last but not least…my DIY disaster. My plan was always to have curtains the same color as the built ins. Rit Dye has an amazing bank of recipes for lots of colors for dying fabrics here but I didn’t see any colors that would be close to my desired color. So obviously wouldn’t you just paint the curtains?! No? Ok. Well, that’s what I did…long story short, it did not work out! I actually did research this before I started and I purchased textile medium and mixed it with my paint.

Then I literally rolled on the paint like I was painting a wall. Unfortunately, the curtains dried very stiff. Like not just a little stiff, A LOT stiff- so stiff they didn’t even look or feel like fabric anymore! I washed them to see if that would help, but it faded them and the paint cracked.

I really want to make these work, so I might try other suggestions I received like sanding them with sand paper and dying them with the paint in a water bath. That’s secondary, though, to the other items that I need to accomplish to finish this room!

The main items I am waiting on at this point are the cabinet doors and drawer fronts, and the faux bricks. These two items will complete this space so I am anxiously awaiting them! Unfortunately, the bricks were delayed so I may be hosting an all night brick installation party…stay tuned and thanks as always for following along on this office renovation journey!