If you have been keeping up with me on Instagram you know that I am participating in Calling It Home’s Fall 2017 One Room Challenge! It is my second time taking part in the challenge, and as always I am humbled to be in the company of such a talented group of designers and bloggers. If you had told me after I finished my first One Room Challenge that I would be back for a second round one year later, I would have been thrilled. But what I really could never have imagined is that I’d be tackling a room in one of my biggest projects to date! — The renovations of The Woodhouse Lodge have turned my life into a perpetual One Room Challenge. Seriously.

If this is your first time stopping by, my name is Megan. I am an Interior Designer and design blogger.  I started out in fine art, fell in love with interior design through my work in editorial, and then two years ago I opened my own Interior design business.  I love what I do in the city and its boroughs, but as a long time resident of Brooklyn, my husband and I were ready for a change of pace. He is a city guy at heart, but still has the slow pace of the South in his bones.

This spring, the stars aligned and we bought a lodge in Greenville NY, a little town in the heart of the Hudson Valley. To make a long-ish story short, we purchased a 1962 A-frame lodge with ten guest rooms that we plan to run as a boutique hotel and event space; you can read more about it here. We’ve been furiously renovating for the past six months, and now that the dust is settling, I finally have a little bit of time to write about the project.

Over the course of the next six weeks, I’ll be documenting the transformation of our living /dining room, which located on the second floor of the lodge. The second floor was originally designed to be an owner’s apartment, and that is exactly how we plan to use it.  The space requires way less work than the gut renovation that I took on for my last One Room Challenge. However, it still has a few obstacles!

The Floor Plan

The open floor plan is a head-scratcher.  This space needs to accommodate both a dining area and a living space. With no natural divisions in the room, furniture placement is going to have to take the place of walls and do this for me. Plese try and forgive me for this room full of chair madness. Currently, we have 5 miss matched chairs, 3 of which are “projects”… because obviously, I don’t have enough of those.

Lack of Wall Space

The lack of wall space is by far the most frustrating part of this design! The largest wall in the room is all windows, and every other wall has at least one door.The biggest uninterrupted lengths of wall are located on the south side of the room, making it the natural location for the living area. Dealing with an open floor plan is a total change of pace form me considering our house in Brooklyn was built in 1910.

So the big question remains, where do we put the TV and my husband’s extensive record collection? I want to avoid media overload, and it is going to require all of my design powers to come up with a solution.  I’ve tried and failed many times over the years to figure out a way of storing thousands of records in an accessible yet understated manner.

Painting

Try not to be jealous, but we are painting every single square centimeter of this room, including the 18 ft. ceilings. Obviously, the coolest thing about this space is its dramatic ceiling height but yikes, painting is going to take FOUR-EVES!

And this friends, is our upstairs kitchen. The previous owner removed the cabinets and fixtures, for completely unfathomable reasons. We will be putting all of that back soon, although not in the next six weeks (sorry). For now, it will remain the cats’ lounge and that’s just the way they like it.

Behind this countertop looking thing are the stairs to the first floor. The stairs were covered in carpet that I ripped up shortly after we bought the lodge. Luckily, there was a pretty pine floor underneath that I plan on showing a little TLC.

I think the wide plank that wraps around at floor level could be a cool feature somehow… My impulse is to put a few Shaker style hooks on it near the landing, but I don’t want the stairs to feel congested. What do you think?

For now, I’ll wrap up our Week 1 post with another design dilemma for you to ponder: I originally really wanted this Shaker woodstove pictured above but with a price tag of 5K and a costly installation, I just can’t make it happen. What I love about the Shaker stove, aside from the fact that it’s insanely beautiful, is that it could potentially sit in front of the windows and give our limited wall space an ideal anchor point.

In search of an alternative (read: cheaper) solution I took to the Facebook Marketplace and found this cool vintage electric fireplace. It was a total bargain at 80 bucks, so if I don’t use it, I’m not going to be heartbroken.  I could see building a little platform for it and adding a few other helpful touches to make it feel integrated and “real.”  My only hesitation is that it is NOT actually a real woodstove and because our wall space is so limited…what if it isn’t worth the effort? Eek!  So dear reader, do I give up the woodstove dream and move on? Or do I try and make this (cool-but-kooky) vintage one work?

Next week, I’ll be back to fill you in on my design plan, and show off some serious painting progress. Predictably, I’m painting the doors black and we’re banishing the brown walls. These are exciting times over at The Woodhouse Lodge. I can’t wait to show you what I have planned, so be sure to check back in next week! You can keep up with my progress in real time on Instagram, I’ll be posting updates on my stories.

Be sure and check out the other One Room Challenge participants!

Boxwood Avenue | Coco & Jack | Design Manifest | IBB for DWD | The House That Lars Built | Little Green Notebook | The Makerista | Making it Lovely | Old Brand New | Old Home Love | The Painted House | Megan Pflug Designs | Pink Pagoda | Erica Reitman | Sacramento Street | Simply Grove | Jill Sorensen | Sugar & Cloth | Vintage Rug Shop | Waiting on Martha *Media Partner House Beautiful | TM by ORC