BrittanyMakes

Pleeeaaaase take me back to last week, Please! Take me back to when delivery times were still on track and wallpaper was freshly hung.  Last week we were all in total bliss, with a little extra time on our hands we weren’t rushed or stressed. What a nice break that was because today I definitely feel stressed!

We have a very tight delivery window for both our nightstands from The Mine and our Suki dresser from Hayneedle, and part of me doesn’t even want to share the dirty truth here on the blog, but the other part of me wants to be as transparent as possible with everyone the reality of renovating a room on a tight timeline and the cold fact that not everything goes according to plan! We show you the pretty side of things generally speaking, but there is a lot of stress and anxiety behind things that are out of your control.

So here’s the truth – there’s a chance our nightstands and our dresser might not arrive in time, but there’s a small chance they will. Everyone pray to the delivery gods for me because I don’t have a backup plan!

To refresh your memory, this is the design direction of my master bedroom:

nightstands | dresser | Salina table lamps | rug (vintage) | sheepskin | accent chair | tufted bed | ceiling fan | Cafe sconces

You want to hear something else that happened this week? Buckle up! It’s truth time folks! There’s a take-away from this lesson I learned and I hope you don’t repeat my mistake so listen closetly. Our wallpaper was installed on Friday, and it looked PERFECT, like drop-dead-gorgeous-I-wanna-lick-the-walls perfect. I was on a high with how good it looked. Two days later when the paper was fully dry, all of a sudden there were jarring seams between the paper, you could literally see each horizontal seam where the white walls peaking through the seams on all 4 walls. I cried (like face in the pillow toddler sobs) not knowing how this was going to get fixed in time without jeopardizing the whole project. It sounds dramatic, but the feelings were real and momentarily I wasn’t sure what to do.  Tears lasted about 3 minutes then I called up my wallpaper guy and explained to him what happened. He was shocked, and came over the next day to take a look. He had never experienced this in decades of wallpaper hanging, and felt sooo bad. He got to fixing it right away, and I’m happy to report after waiting another 72 hours for everything to dry, it looks perfect!

So what’s the lesson? It turns out this handcrafted wallpaper expands more than expected when wet, enough so that you have to nearly overlap the seams when hanging it so that when the paper dries it shrinks to it’s proper place. We were lucky to have enough left over paper to fix it. Moral of the wallpaper story is – A) have your wallpaper guy call the manufacturer to confirm any nuances of the paper, and B) order extra, for waste and extra for repairs, just in case. Most wallpaper is printed in batches, and if we were to order this wallpaper at a later date there’s no guarantee the colors would match which is why you want to order a little extra from the start, even though it might hurt the wallet a little.

On the bright side, we finally installed our new ceiling fan! This is the Mobi ceiling fan from Craftmade. If a ceiling fan could have sex appeal, this one definitely has it! The charcoal wood grain, the black base… hot mama! Craftmade was so amazing to work with, they made sure I selected the proper down rod length and the fan arrived in like two days!  We chose a fan with a light kit out of convenience, but I hear some folks don’t prefer lights with their ceiling fans? Why is this? We have multiple sources of light in the room, but this is our only overhead lighting. I suppose if we had can lights we wouldn’t need a light kit with our fan.

We are installing Emtek door hardware throughout our house! Emtek is sponsoring the One Room Challenge, and I am STOKED to have new door hardware! If you remember we used Emtek for our front door hardware at our old house. I chose the Helios lever in matte black with the rectangle back plate, and these handles seriously amp up the style factor in our home.  I chose the lever over a knob because the lever leans slightly more traditional and maybe even a bit feminine, and I think pairing it alongside the more modern clean lined furniture pieces in the room, this marriage of styles is helping me achieve that tight tension between modern and traditional I’ve been going for this whole time.

And another exciting addition to the space is a giant fiddle leaf fig tree. A REAL one! All this talk on blogs lately of faux trees, I almost considered it, but this room has a wall FULL of windows and our backyard is completely private so we can keep the windows uncovered all day long. Fingers crossed this fiddle has found a happy home and will double in growth year after year! (ha! yeah right).

You know what to do! Hop through the list and see everyone’s last ORC progress installment updates!

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 *

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