If you are new here, welcome to the halfway point of the One Room Challenge and to the NestFeathers blog! A tiny bit about me: I’m Janet, an interior designer, blogger, cooking enthusiast, and relentless hostess (at least before all this pandemic insanity), and this is my little corner of the world northwest of Boston.

We are wrapping up week 4 of the Vintage Diva Glamour Den and that means we should be halfway done! And while I’ve been madly shopping for All The Things, it seems impossible we will get done in time. Of course, what is a diva den without a little drama!

In case you need to get up to speed on what we are doing and WHO the Diva is…WEEK 1 | WEEK 2 | WEEK 3

And a bit about the One Room Challenge - It is a biannual challenge conceived by Linda Weinstein of Calling it Home for participants (designers and bloggers including 20 featured designers and 300+ guest participants) to complete one room from design through installation in a mere 6 weeks (8 weeks this time, thankfully, because. pandemic.) and document the process in weekly posts. Better Homes and Gardens is the official media partner and you can follow the hashtags #oneroomchallenge, #betterhomesandgardens and #bhgorc to find out what participants are up to! Check out the links to all the participant posts here.

On to our week, such as it has been! We’ve been focused on the windows, the bedding, and the feature wall this week.

A delay in getting the all important fabric sample cutting for the draperies, caused a fair bit of drama already, but I am happy to report, it came and was just perfect. So we ordered the 20 yds we will need for the curtain panels and it has shipped and is due to arrive Friday. Hallelujah, because the super secret feature wall and that patterned fabric are the two key pieces driving this whole space!

And by the way, you should NEVER assess your wall paint color lying flat on a table like that. It looks anemic that way, when on the walls it is a very pretty pale celery, neutral, but not too neutral. To check the fabric we held it against the walls and trim in the orientation it would be in as drapes - this is the only way to get an accurate idea of how the colors work together!

Window Treatment Progress

Twenty yards seems like a lot for two ordinary smallish windows, but 2 things…I’m having the curtains hang floor to nearly ceiling and extend past the windows on the sides (this post on custom vs ready made curtains has a visual on why extending past the window works wonders!) I’m covering the full width of the headboard on the window that will be behind that, so I need more than one width per panel. AND the fabric has an enormous, nearly 27” pattern repeat, so I need extra yardage for the workroom to match the the pattern on the panels and the seams.

In my shopping frenzy I also ordered bamboo blinds for under the curtains….sight unseen without a sample. This is NOT something I would ever do for clients and not something I recommend. Ever. But they are returnable since they are not custom sized and desperate times…I need these cheap and fast. They are primarily for the look and texture and since they will probably never be lowered, I could not justify the expense of the beautiful Hunter Douglas version I would normally recommend. A very tight budget means compromises have to made - they are on their way here, so we’ll see how they look in person soon enough..

Now I need to find drapery hardware I can afford and also that I can live with. In a perfect world I would have these gorgeous French return rods, brackets, and rings made by my local iron fabricator in this beautiful antique gold finish that I have used on a couple of projects. I ADORE these rods. So far, nothing I’ve found to order online comes close and time is running out.

Feature Wall Progress

I ordered a fleet of tree branch hooks to try out for the afore-mentioned super secret feature wall. These are also returnable if they aren’t everything we’ve dreamed of…but they look really promising for our purposes and totally fit the elegant-woodland-nymph-secret-garden aesthetic we are after.

If you are as enamored with these hooks as I am, they can be found here: Bird Hook | Branch Hook | Double Branch Hook

Please note: this post contains affiliate links and so I may make a small commission on any purchases at no additional cost to you

AND, I procured a sample of sheet metal from the conveniently located metal shop less than a mile from me! Brad, at All Metal Fabricators, has been tremendously helpful and responsive! I will definitely be using them in the future…I have a stove hood in mind and this is just the company, but THAT is a conversation for a totally different time. As it turns out, this piece of sheet metal MAY be a bit of overkill for the project, and it’s pretty pricey, so I’m investigating a budget friendly alternative….decisions, decisions!

Bedding Progress

We already have the bedskirt and the coverlet gets delivered to Danny, my upholstery genius, tomorrow to be turned onto a headboard. I ordered some sheets that I think will be a nice pattern mix with the drapery fabric. We’ll see. And if the pattern and color works when they arrive, I will have the top sheet made into a duvet cover for the Diva. She prefers to be European and deal with only a duvet and fitted sheet rather than the traditional top sheet/blanket situation. We’ll also be using an ivory coverlet and shams in a geometric texture to fill out the bedding ensemble cast

I keep promising to start the slave labor soon and I’m off to buy chalk paint (I think!) for the vanity. The allure of chalk paint is the lack of prep necessary. The local Ace hardware did not actually stock the chalk paint yet…they are going to start stocking it next month, which helps me not at all. And they could order it for me, but don’t even have the color chips to look at. GAH. I’m headed to Home Depot next to procure the chalk paint from there. I’m looking for a deep mossy green which might involve some dark wax over olive chalk paint. Wax sounds like a LOT of work. Alas. At least it will count as exercise, or arm toning, or something!

See you all again next week for the continuing drama at the Vintage Diva Glamour Den!