One Room Challenge: E-Design

When it comes to picking out clothes, putting together a tablescape, throwing a party or doing my makeup I have no shortage of opinions. Honestly the extent to which I am able to form an opinion and make a decision is downright annoying to most people. One of the reasons I love this blog so much is because I love shopping, traveling and tinkering with my hair and makeup only to share these experiences with you guys. So you can imagine the frustration I feel when it comes to my indecisiveness over home decor.

Sure I could flip through a Restoration Hardware magazine and go to town if my name was Beyonce but we have mouths to feed and minds to educate so blowing our life savings on light fixtures isn’t exactly feasible. I want to save money to decorate one way but I also don’t want to live in a house that doesn’t look anything like “me”. I loathe trinkets and knickknacks laying around (#OCD) and it’s almost impossible to decorate simplistically and have it looked polished without some incredibly good items & textures, a.k.a without spending money. This is precisely the reason why I’m sitting in a house right now that I’ve lived in for 5 years and have actually “decorated” only a couple of rooms.

Enter my friend Sara. I met Sara 5 years ago when I worked with her husband. As soon as I heard about Sara I knew I liked her because she was (wait for it) an interior designer. Meaning she is in the category of people that are a good two points ahead of all of the rest of us. Sara just launched her interior design company, Elby Wren, and so we’ve been chatting a lot about all things blogging and social media lately. Once I found out about this little thing called the One Room Challenge I immediately enlisted her help with making design decisions, sourcing products and having a very helpful and very professional opinion for all of the decisions I was wrestling through.

For example I really love how these lights look and want them incorporated in our room. I think they look great down a hallway but we are also kicking around the idea of sliding barn doors to give us more space in our closets. I can see things in my head but it helps so much to see them in a rendering and compare my options.

I also had several thoughts about the room. Option 1 (Below) has the walls exactly like they are now, smaller bedside tables to open the space up, layered rugs for texture and the light fixtures down the hallway leading to our bathroom to brighten things up. This was the vision I initially shared in my first One Room Challenge post.

As I got to thinking about it (a dangerous activity for sure) I asked her what she thought about lighter floors, shiplap on the back wall, bigger side tables for storage and barn doors down the hall to free up space in our closets. She whipped up this rendering and was able to keep my lighting + picture vision by pairing it with a bench on one of my walls.

This in and of itself is worth the price of admission. I had a trained professional spend very little time thinking through what I wanted incorporated in the space and presenting it to me in a way that is very easy to visualize. This helps me make decisions at the beginning of a project, ensure I’m going to like the outcome and save a lot of money in the long run from being able to plan my room and not having to redo things or make costly mistakes.