Hello and welcome to Week 4 of the One Room Challenge! I'm afraid these pics don't show a ton of progress, despite the fact that we've been working our tukuses off around here. (That is for sure how you spell tukus).
DIY upholstered headboard
It's gorgeous. Well, the fabric is. My headboard could maybe use a teensy bit of leveling out. We'll get there.
Next up: the dresser. It took awhile, and I don't think a master craftsman would be bowled over by my work here, but I think it looks great. l'll go in-depth on both this and the headboard after we finally do the big reveal and I write some post-mortem posts. The color in the photograph is of course terrible, but I think the sweet sea-green is lovely, and it goes smashingly with the rug.
About that rug. It wouldn't be Week 4 if things didn't start going sideways. For me, the snafus started with this darn rug.
This picture is terrible, but you can see the difference in the rug color, right? This rug was under our bed in a previous lifetime, which makes it extra-embarrassing that it was so filthy around the shape of our bed. But that's nothing that can't be solved, right? Right? (I am foreshadowing here). I got an online coupon for an area rug cleaning, and was sooooo super excited to have this rug returned to its former glory. But then the guy got here and informed me it'd cost an extra $160 - on TOP of the $40 I'd spent on the coupon. Well, I could buy a ton of new rugs for that price, so I politely declined and borrowed a rug cleaner from a friend instead. (I can do it all by myself).
I put the kids to bed and cleaned the rug, and went to bed humming songs of optimism and cheer. The next morning, I woke to a grandma's-basement smelling disaster of a ruined rug. Womp womp. There were water marks and the whole thing looked even filthier than before, so I decided to work against the clock and reclean it before it dried. Westley, who hates all things vacuum or vacuum-adjacent, screamed the whole time. It was AWESOME.
First, I draped it over some chairs and her bed and directed fans at it, but the musty smell was only intensifying in this tiny room, and I was singing sad songs of despair and hopelessness. In the end, I needed it out of here. (The extra-fun thing about this challenge is that Lou actually needs her room while I'm working on it, so everything has to be returned to normal at night). So I dragged the whole sopping thing out onto my rooftop to dry. Nothing says clean-and-disinfect quite like a filthy Brooklyn roof.
Drying kilim rug in the sun.
That was Tuesday. Thirty-six hours of dry time in the chilly sun later, the smell is gone. Phew! In the end, after scouring the internet for new rug options, I'm going to still use this one. It doesn't look great. But it's going in a kid's room and I'd rather use my non-existent budget on chandelier beads and new curtains. Oh right, 'cause the curtains.
I had some linen sheers from Crate and Barrel that I wanted to use, but they were super yellow. So I boiled them with baking soda and salt, and got a ton of yellow out of them.
DIY Curtain cleaning with salt and baking soda
Eeeewww.
Buuuut, they're still kinda yellow. Some spots are bad. I'm going to get some oxygen bleach today and try one more time, but I'm not optimistic. This photo doesn't seem to show the yellow as much as I see it in person. I was really hoping to add pom poms to these (all pom poms everywhere), but I just don't want to do that on yellowed curtains. So I'm going to hunt for inexpensive new ones. Wish me luck! And be sure to follow along with the incredible designers and guest participants at Calling it Home!
One Room Challenge.