Kate Pearce Vintage Week 4 Speakeasy Updates | One Room Challenge Spring 2021

We’re officially at the halfway point for the Spring 2021 One Room Challenge and I am feeling good about the progress we’ve made. It is almost at that point in a renovation where a lot of the larger stuff is done, yet the finish line is still a few miles away. We still have flooring, cabinet hardware, backsplash tiling, upholstering, and lots of detail work to finish up. Still, we did accomplish a lot this week and I’m here to tell you all about that.

THE COUNTERTOP

We decided to go with a butcherblock countertop in this space for a few reasons. The first reason being cost. This is a basement space that will not be used nearly as often as a kitchen, so we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a countertop. The second reason is simply that dark wood counters just made sense for this space. We love how the butcherblock look complements the more sleek black cabinets. Wood also plays nicely into that whole “basement moody speakeasy” vibe.

We bought these countertops from Home Depot and stained them using Varathane’s Early American. It was fairly quick, inexpensive, and gave us the biggest bang for our buck.

THE WALLS

I surprised myself this week by choosing a color for the walls. This is something I rarely do. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that I either paint walls black or white, or wallpaper them. But this rich terracotta just seemed to fit this space like a piece to a puzzle. I didn’t want a wallpaper in a basement space. Even though we keep a heavy duty dehumidifier down there, it just seemed like a bad idea. White was just too bright for a dark, secretive speakeasy space. And black just seemed like it would be too dark. After all, we only have one tiny window in this entire space.

That left me with two color choices that I was considering: terracotta or green. To be honest, I did flirt with the idea of pink for a hot second. Billy shot that one down quickly. But green would make the space monotone, between the green tile and the green ceiling. I love playing around with that monotone look, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling it this time around. When I found Baked Terracotta by Benjamin Moore, I just knew it was the right color for this space. I chose it by grabbing one of the hues from the Cyrille Gulassa print that will be going in this space, courtesy of Minted.

THE BENCH UPHOLSTERY

I took you on a very quick trip to the fabric store with us this week. We went through lots of options and finally landed on a pea green velvet for the bench. I will quickly run you through our thought process on that. The bench is going to have a channeled upholstery, so any print felt out of the question, especially considering our VERY amateur upholstery skills. Billy felt a bit intimated by the idea of working with a pleather or any other kind of very thick material. And, to be honest, velvet felt like just the right amount of swanky for a basement speakeasy.

We landed on the pea green after lots of deliberation. We didn’t want to be too “matchy-matchy” with the green zellige or the ceiling, and the warm tones of the pea green seemed to complement the warm tones in the tile and the ceiling. It was different enough to stand on its own, and complementary enough to the other green elements to make it work.

PLANS FOR WEEK 5

As we head into week five of the One Room Challenge, we have a few items we are determined to knock off the list:

1. Tile the backsplash in that gorgeous green zellige from Riad.
2. Order the black and white checkered tile from Home Depot (we are toying with the idea of using these black and white tiles in a different way than that ubiquitous checkered pattern). Stay tuned.
3. Install all five light fixtures from LETI.
4. Put the wine fridge in place.
5. Install the hardware on the cabinets. If you were following along on IG, you may have seen the vintage art deco half-moon pulls I scored on eBay this week.

As always, be sure to check in to our Instagram story highlights on my page for updates. Everything from this ORC is saved under “ORC 2021” on my profile. And, of course, be sure to head over to the One Room Challenge site to check out all of the other incredible transformations happening this season.

See yah next week!