ONE ROOM CHALLENGE™, GUEST PARTICIPANT SPRING 2020, WEEK 3

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE™, GUEST PARTICIPANT SPRING 2020, WEEK 3

Welcome to week 3 of the One Room Challenge, guest participant Spring 2020! 

Thanks for stopping by, please take your time and have a look around.

You could start by checking out our $100 Master Bathroom Makeover here, and then head over to our recipe page to grab a few new ideas.

In case you don’t know what the One Room Challenge is, I’ll give you a quick rundown.

The ORC will provide participants with a supportive, enthusiastic forum to share the process of transforming a room. The ORC is not a competition, but rather a celebration of creativity, inspiration, and original ideas. Welcome!


The One Room Challenge™, currently in its seventeenth season, is a widely anticipated biannual event every April and October. It has been postponed to May this year because of Covid-19.

Each round, twenty design influencers are selected to take the challenge, as Featured Designers, and transform a space. Every Wednesday, the designers document their process while sharing their sources and professional advice over six weekly posts.

In addition to following along, everyone with a blog or Instagram account, is welcome to join the fun as a Guest Participant by linking their own room transformations up during the eight weeks. Each Thursday, the internet and social media are flooded with interior design inspiration, ideas, and encouragement.

To date, more than 3,800 rooms have been transformed through the One Room Challenge™. The event, and many of the spaces, have been recognized and featured.

For the next eight weeks, these gifted designers will take you behind the scenes as they transform their rooms into beautiful spaces. I hope you will stop by their sites each week as they share the reality of what it takes to create an amazing space, it will be exciting to see the hurdles they overcome along with the victories they achieve!

ONE ROOM CHALLENGE™ FEATURED DESIGNERS

A Glass of Bovino | Beginning in the Middle | Beth Diana Smith | Clark + Aldine | Coco & Jack

Deeply Southern HomeDesign Maze | Dwell by Cheryl | Erika Ward | Home Made by Carmona

House of Hipsters | Hunted Interior | Kandrac & Kole | Kate Pearce | Katrina Blair | Liz Kamarul

Veneer DesignsRambling Renovators | Renovation Husbands | Studio Plumb | Media BH&G

Follow Along 

Get ready to check your Instagram feed as we embark on this exciting design journey together. We hope our photos motivate and inspire you over the next eight weeks. Every Thursday I will be posting info about our progress here on the blog as well as linking upwith all of the other guest participants, so be sure to check back often.

You can also  Follow #oneroomchallenge and #BHGORC so you don’t miss a thing! And of course be sure to check back on June 25-July 21st to be amazed by the final room reveals.

Progress

 

We got a lot done on our deck (our ORC Spring 2020) this week. Amidst rain, thunderstorms and freezing temperatures at night. I can’t remember that last time it went below freezing after May 1st. So much for the early gardens out there. This week we started working on getting our cables installed, this was the part of our renovation I was most looking forward to. I knew it was going to dramatically change the way our deck looked; I can’t tell you how much I love them! The old pickets felt like a jail, now that they are gone our deck feels so inviting and spacious!

deck before renovation

We began by enlisting the help of our teenage boys to knock out the old pickets, it went surprisingly fast.They left really ugly paint lines behind, so we’ll be updating you on that in the coming weeks.The cables went in great. I bought this kit on amazon that included all the hardware we needed.

This was the perfect budget solution, because it can get a little confusing ordering each piece individually.

We also ordered 400 feet of this 1/8 inch stainless cable.

 

Here is the short and sweet of how to do it:

We used 8 strands of cable spaced evenly from top to bottom.
First, make a template out of wood or cardboard for your hole spacing. You will use this each time you run your cable through a post or anchor it on the ends.

Make sure to get the template just right.

If your holes aren’t evenly spaced it will really show up once your cable is up. One end of the deck will be the non-tightening side, or anchor side of the cable. For the anchoring side, use your template and mark your center points.

Pro tip: place the 180 degree cable guide inside your anchor before screwing it to your post. You can still get them on if you forget, but it’s much easier to do it first.

 Let your anchor and 180 degree turn hang there for now, don’t worry about the cable yet. Use your template and a long ¼ inch drill to drill through the posts that the cable will pass through. THIS is the one we used . Only pass the cable straight through.

 

Don’t try to drill around a corner post. On the corners of deck, start the process over. Once you get your holes drilled all the way to a corner you will need to attach your anchor and turnbuckle.

A turnbuckle is designed to take the slack out of the cable to give that nice tight, clean look that we all love. Attach your anchor to the post, with the turnbuckle already in place.

working on deck during renovation

working on deck during renovation

You can pre-place the 180 degree cable turns to the end of all of your turnbuckles to make life a little easier. You will put your cable crimp on your cable first, then wrap the end of the cable around your 180 turn and back through the other side of your crimp. This will make sense when you do it your first time. We used THIS crimping tool, and it worked out great.

This part is really a two-person job.
One person holds the cable and crimp while the other locks the cable in place with the crimping tool. Watch your fingers! Measure out your length of cable and cut it off clean. We tried a couple different cable cutters, and THESE guys were by far the best.
Don’t mess around with the other ones, they don’t leave your cable ends with a clean cut that will easily pass through your crimps. Now wrap your cable around the 180 degree turn and crimp it off.

You want to pull the cable as tight as possible before crimping it, your turnbuckle on the other end will finish the tightening job. Now just repeat this process until all your cables are up. If you have stairs, I recommend doing them last. We wanted to perfect our process before tackling them.

More on that in the coming weeks – I’ll let you know how it goes!

It’s a pretty big improvement, don’t you think?

 

deck before renovation

 

deck after renovation pretty sunrise