Spring 2021 One Room Challenge Week 2: Our Game Room Design Boards and How We Built Custom Cube Storage

Written By Susan Hill

Gosh!! The week has flown by and while we have done a lot we have had some obstacles to overcome! The good news is, boxes have been arriving from sponsors! Such a relief to know that we may have a completed room by the reveal date! You know I would love to talk about construction and the problems I’m dealing with, but I know we all want to see the plans so I’ll show you the plans and get into the struggles a bit later! If you are just joining in, you can catch up on who I am here and Week 1 here.

Gaming Room Mood Board: A Lovely and Soothing Monochromatic Space

Here we go!! I’ll start off by sharing my inspiration board and design boards. This is always part of what we do for client projects to give a clear idea of the aesthetic and general direction. Based on what we learned last week about what Sophia wanted merged with what I need, we’ve got a pretty good vibe that will make both of us happy.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Next up are the design boards which show actual products!! I’m excited to share the sponsors and their products over the next several weeks. Make sure to follow along on Instagram so you can stay caught up! I try to share really important information from the construction perspective and teach as I go, so join in! You can also find the Stories in Highlights.

The entire plan began with really lovely fabrics from our trade showroom we source product through, The Designers Marketplace. Karol Ann and Tracy are such a great resource for my team and so knowlegable we feel really blessed to be able to have them as part of our design family. When they learned about the One Room Challenge, they immediately jumped at the opportunity to sponsor the sectional with me! The Designers Marketplace is set up to support interior designers and decorators with sources we may otherwise not be able to carry. Most vendors expect you to carry their product on a shop floor and order a lot, so it isn’t friendly to boutique design firms. Designers Marketplace offer so many great lines, place all orders and manage any issues that arise with product. If you are in the industry and need a great resource, they are the ones to call. Keep an eye out for the launch their new website for interior designers, making it easy to place orders online instead of having to complete PO’s to send into the showroom. They also will be offering a room builder for those that do not use AutoCad or another drafting platform as an option to quickly lay out a room. Seriously can’t get better than that!! The sectional vendor, Rowe also stepped up and helped expedite the shipping process so we would be able to have the sectional arrive in time. Can’t wait to see that baby in the room!!

Most of you are aware of supply chain issues, but our industry has really been affected. Covid hit hard and the freeze in Texas caused damage to the four manufacturers who make the chemicals to make foam. So delays in foam have gotten far worse and what typically takes 6 weeks now take 6 months to make. Getting shipping expedited was such a great thing!

I chose a lot of monochromatic colors to keep the room soothing and introduced charcoal gray tones for Sophia to ground the space. A good middle ground for both of us! I’m layering a Loloi area rug over the new broadloom carpet. The Giada area rug has so many great colors in it. The gray is mixed with some lovely lavenders and blues and the terra cotta and brick tones are the perfect combination to create a sitting area. I can’t wait to share more about it in my stories.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Detailed Renovation Plan

I can’t really approach my own project and build anything without having CAD drawings to follow, just as we would for clients. The boards show my elevations, but we have been building from more detailed drawings.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

I hope you guys caught my Stories with the Louver Shop this past week. If you didn’t, you can catch it in the ORC Highlights. So much great information about shutter types and installations, make sure you check it out!! I’ll talk more about the shutters when they get installed, but I’m really excited about the horizontal line that they will carry through in the room. They are also a great way to control light and provide privacy.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Construction Management

One Room Challenge - Susan Hill Interior Design

Since we had so much construction to manage for this project, the first thing we did was take up the carpet. I decided to replace it with new carpet and of course that created a domino effect since the wall to wall carpet runs everywhere on our second floor!! Ugghh!! Replacing one thing always leads in some way to other items needing to be replaced. This happens a lot on client projects so it’s nothing new, but so frustrating on my own project and not something I really planned on!! I have to replace the carpet in the hallway as well, but I do not want carpet so we are matching the hardwood downstairs. That is if I can find product in stock. Who knows if I can and if I can get it here in time. I’ll keep you posted on that. I’d love to replace the hardwoods downstairs as well, but that is a way larger project than I want to take on right now, so that’s a no go.

One Room Challenge Spring 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

The carpet was cut out and we carried it down to the trash. We could not however, move the entertainment center that we had for over 20 years. That thing was a beast. I donated the furniture to two charities our design firm volunteers for; Hope House and Furnished for Good. The guys with Furnished moved the piece out for me and thank goodness, there was no other way it was leaving the house!! These are both such great organiztions and my team and I feel really blessed to be able to donate our time to help. If you’d like to follow along with what we do to help Hope House and Furnished you can follow the links I’ve provided.

One Room Challenge Spring 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Our next task was creating a little more privacy in my bedroom. Since the gaming room is next to my bedroom and I can hear everything through the walls, I wanted to insulate the walls with sound barrier insulation. I chose Rock Wool Safe and Sound sound insulation since it is what we spec for client projects. It’s great to prevent sound from carrying into adjacent rooms and it’s non-combustible; so good all the way around! We had to figure out how to get the insulation in without tearing the entire wall down so we opted to cut open a channel in the wall. This actually worked really well and you can see a Story Highlight on our Instagram Page. I’ll also be talking about insulation this week in my Stories or maybe a Live so watch for that as well.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Building Custom Cubbies for Storage

Our next task was building the cubbies and snack station cabinets. We had a good plan or so we thought. I wanted to build everything out of white oak. It’s super easy to get a good color with white oak and easy to match up to other wood species. The grain isn’t as strong as red oak, but none of my vendors could get white oak. Literally no one had it in stock.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

So we started to try to find red oak. This is weeks ago and if we could get it, we were looking at a two month lead time!! I finally broke down and ordered material from Home Depot. They had red oak plywood in stock and red oak lumber they could ship so I ordered and paid for it, but they didn’t pull my order and when we went to pick it up, the plywood was gone! I was so mad, but that wasn’t going to get cubbies built.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

We finally decided to buy birch plywood and began to cut material. Well nothing was going right with the table saw and the circular saw blade was not getting a straight cut so we didn’t get very far after an entire afternoon. We broke down and called our friend Kenny with Interior Woods. He was so gracious and said he would help us cut material. He actually helped us cut, edge band, pocket hole and assemble the two cubbies that needed to be installed first. He saved us days of work. If you are local to Charlotte and don’t know about Kenny and his custom cabinet shop, Interior Woods, you need to check it out! They do beautiful work and can really create anything.

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

One Room Challenge 2021 - Susan Hill Interior Design

Well the cubbies are installed. But not without a lot of frustration through the entire process. We assembled them from the back to get the center shelves in and didn’t stop to think to check to see if the shelves were even. They weren’t. I couldn’t look at uneven shelves for years so I took them apart and drilled new holes and reinstalled them.

Susan Hill Interior Design One Room Challenge Spring 2021

What’s Next?

You can follow that process in my Stories on Instagram. Well that’s about as far as we got. But the saga continues. The red oak lumber I ordered from Home Depot arrived a few days ago to build the TV wall. Today, red oak lumber arrived from another online vendor to build the portion of wall that was suppose to be tongue and groove material. So the good news is we have material. The bad news is, it’s a total mixed bag!! A total hot mess. I now have to figure out how to get birch and red oak stained to match one another and also match the console from Apt2B.

Well stay tuned next week to see if I figure it out yet.

Susan Hill http://susanhillinteriordesign.com
Previous

Spring 2021 One Room Challenge Week 3: Setting the Foundation for the Game Room Renovation
Next

Spring 2021 One Room Challenge Week 1: Transforming the Playroom into a Gaming Room