Yikes! It’s Week 7 of the One Room Challenge! For this national room makeover challenge, we are redoing a bedroom we have dubbed the Vintage Diva Glamour Den in honor of the Diva (whose room it is) and her vintage hat collection along with her elegant-Victorian-secret-garden sensibility which inspired the design.

Need to catch up on where we started and what we’ve been up to? If you’ve missed the other weeks you can read about them here: WEEK 1 | WEEK 2 | WEEK 3 | WEEK 4 | WEEK 6 (and sort of 5) | more WEEK 6

Special thanks to ORC founder Linda Weinstein for providing this opportunity, and media sponsor Better Homes and Gardens!

This week, we’ve made some headway on our super secret feature wall and we are ready to spill the beans on what we are doing…mostly.

In keeping with our secret garden inspiration, we wanted a mural wall….ish. AND, the Diva had a brilliant idea! What if we could magnetize our mural wall somehow so we could stick things to it and move them around? Something like hooks…

We explored the possibility of magnetic paint, but that isn’t strong enough to work under wallpaper and hold anything, so we moved on to magnetic metal sheets. We didn’t want to cover the WHOLE wall in metal, so we opted to divide our mural up into 3 more manageable sized panels. And the hunt for the perfect mural that would work for this was on…in the middle of the lockdown portion of this adventure.

We turned to the internet and discovered the perfect affordable mural at Wallmur. The staff was enormously responsive and helpful with what we were trying to do. They sent out a sample that was a dollhouse size as well as a small section at full scale, but they would print blown up (or down) to any size we requested. The colors and pattern were perfect!

The next step was to lay out the size panels we wanted to scale on the wall and do some higher math to figure out the ratio we needed and where the panels should be cut from the mural. We decided on 2’ x 5’ panels after exploring some other ratios to get as much tree as possible but still get them at sort of “life size”.

We marked up the dollhouse version with a scaled temple showing exactly the sections we wanted printed and at what size and placed our order. Within a couple of weeks the panels arrived! SO Exciting - We had the critical starting point for the whole design!

Next we needed the metal sheets. Although there are internet sources for this, I happen to have a metal fabricator company right here less than a mile away, so I emailed to see if A, they were open during this bizarre time, and B, if they could create what I needed. I got a reply right away from Brad at All Metal Fabricators and he could not have been nicer or more accommodating. He provided me with a sample so I could test my idea before purchasing the large sheets.

I went off and investigated really strong magnets so they would work through a layer of wallpaper and paste…still need to test it with the paste, but the 6 pound pull button magnets that I ordered work perfectly with the metal and wallpaper. I also ordered some small molding stock to outline my panels.

Today was the day my BIL came (thank you Uncle John!) to install the molding he mitered for me. I wrangled him into also installing the sheet metal, which, it turns out, is pretty heavy in sheets that large! He’s a saint and set to work today finding the studs and gluing and nailing the panels in place and then attaching the molding frames.

I can’t wait to see this completed! I just need to fill and touch up the nail holes and then we can install the wallpaper panels for real - yippee!! And then it just needs the finishing touches. Hmmmm…

Next is the very exciting part where all the work comes together! Check back for the big finish! Also, check out what’s happening with the other featured and guest participants in this one room challenge HERE!

See you soon with the big reveal!