One Room Challenge Week 2
ORC Week 2: All About the Prep Work!
It’s Week 2 of the Fall 2025 One Room Challenge, and I’m already slipping behind my self-imposed schedule. It’s so easy to underestimate just how long the prep work takes – and also so easy to underestimate the importance of it. When it comes to home design, half the job is just the prep work of getting ready to do the job!
For those of you reading about this for the first time, the One Room Challenge is an online event held twice a year that invites homeowners to tackle the transformation of a single room in just eight weeks. This is my first time as a guest participant, and my project is our daughter’s old bedroom. Check out last week’s blog for more details if you missed it: One Room Challenge
The tasks this week were simple. Here’s what I accomplished, with a little help from my husband, Mike:
Cleared as much of the furniture out of the room as possible. (More on that below.)
Removed shelves, light fixtures, and other items that our daughter left behind when she moved out.
Took off all the switchplates and outlet covers.
Took down the window shade.
Scrubbed the walls and baseboards.
Filled nail and screw holes.
Taped off the ceiling and one wall to get ready for skim coating.
Taped down some plastic sheets to protect the carpeting and baseboards.
We didn’t have any place to put the bed, so it’s staying covered up in the middle of the room for now. I still haven’t decided whether to keep the furniture in that room or to get rid of it and convert the room to an exercise room. What will probably happen is that I’ll spend the next six weeks working around the bed, and then at the last moment decide to get rid of it. And then I’ll wonder why I didn’t make things easy for myself and just sell the bed right from the start.
The next stage will be the skim coating. On my schedule, I initially included that as part of the prep work of Week 2, but it’s really going to be a job of its own, so I feel like I’m still right on schedule. Prep work completed: Check!
I’ll talk more about the skim coating next week, but for now, here’s the general idea: One wall of the room will get a wallpaper mural, and I want to smooth down the wall to ensure none of the existing orange-peel texture shows through. I’ll also skim coat and smooth the ceiling, because I’m using a glossy paint and I want a mirror-smooth finish.
I’ve never done a skim coating before, but all of the YouTube videos I’ve watched say it’s a beginner-level project. Should be easy, right?
I hope you’ll continue to follow along with my progress on the Fall 2025 One Room Challenge! You can find my weekly blogs here on my website, with additional updates on my Instagram (@cancaninteriors) and my Facebook page (CanCan Interiors). Also be sure to check out the ONE ROOM CHALLENGE® website and @oneroomchallenge, where you can see the fun and fabulous projects being undertaken by all of the other One Room Challenge participants.
Here are all of the Week 1 posts: Fall 2025 - Week 1 — ONE ROOM CHALLENGE®.
And here’s the link for Week 2: Fall 2025 - Week 2 — ONE ROOM CHALLENGE®.
