Wow!, we are already a week into the One Room Challenge and I’m amazed at how fluid time is - one day takes forever and yet the week flies by! Today, we’ll talk about the inspiration for the space and some of the slow progress we are making on the Vintage Diva Glamour Den. We are both excited and terrified to be participating for the first time. And we picked a pandemic to figure this whole thing out…which means a lot more complication and some DIY!

If you missed Week One with all the before pictures of the room and an explanation of what exactly this whole One Room Challenge is, you can find that HERE.

A little about the “client”, my daughter, AKA the Diva: She is an opera singer and voice teacher (now teaching via zoom in this brave new world!), with a decidedly Victorian vintage sensibility, and a love of cats, beautiful gardens, Victorian houses, European towns, vintage hats, Indian cooking, delicious food, and pretty teacups and dishes. I like to think I am responsible for at least the last two of those! Her Pinterest account has a board labeled “Leafy Branchy Things” with a description that says “If it were socially acceptable to decorate like a forest nymph, I would.”

All that led to a a room design inspired by gardens and trees, but with a refined English secret garden feel. The Victorian elements we are hoping to find will include some bamboo, burl wood, and needlepoint pieces. The colors of flowers and an assortment of vintage hats on a backdrop of green and cream with woodland tones will inform the choices. Well that, AND a fairly tight budget!

So this week, we have scored a great dresser on FB marketplace to replace the broken pine armoire for clothing storage…we are off later today to retrieve it! Unfortunately, it doesn’t QUITE fit in our car, but a kind friend is lending her socially-distanced chauffeuring assistance to help us get it home…stay tuned!

And here are some of the fabrics we are considering…definitely a matelassé for the bedskirt and possibly the upholstered headboard IF the workroom gets to reopen, and a print for the draperies (which, hopefully, my drapery workroom will still be able to do). The blue/green/yellow on the right is SO pretty, but more than twice the cost of the more colorful linen print on the middle. Since the room has northern light exposure, the warmer tones in the less expensive print are helpful anyway (how often do you get THAT lucky?!). We’ve ordered a sample to see if it is as pretty as it seems before we place an order for the 15 yds we need for the windows. Yikes. Beautifully made custom window treatments are one of my favorite indulgences because they TOTALLY elevate the design of a room! The Diva’s nursery was the first room in our house to get custom window treatments and her childhood room was the second one that got them. (We won’t mention what she did to the custom pillows that matched them….suffice it to say she has outgrown her destructive tendencies!)

Next week we’ll have some decisions made, orders placed, and can possibly start working on the slave labor portion of this adventure AKA rehabilitating the furniture!

Click HERE to visit the ORC blog for links to the other participants in the One Room Challenge for tons more inspiration!

Special Thanks to the Linda Weinstein, Better Homes & Gardens, and the ORC for providing this wonderful opportunity and inspiration to complete a project!