ORC Week 6: The Beach Cabin Sleeper Attic Makeover
Hello and Happy Friday! I am feeling especially cheerful as we finished up and photographed the attic makeover this week for the One Room Challenge. It has been a wonderful experience to participate in the ORC with such a talented and supportive group. Check out all of the final projects here. Many thanks to Linda from Calling It Home and media partner Better Homes & Gardens for hosting this lovely event!
The goal for the Beach Cabin Attic was to make it special for kids but also livable for adults. We rent the Beach Cabin for a few weeks each summer and the families that visit vary in their needs for accommodation. Hopefully, this space provides all of the essentials. It’s been fun to be a little more “themed” than I would be at our own house with the sailboat and red, white, and blue scheme.
Throughout the process, I have said a couple of times that I think if I were to participate in an ORC in the future, I would want it to be a space where I had more professional help… maybe a few less DIY projects. But, I think I secretly like all the DIY and love involving friends and family in the process from lunch breaks with my parents, puppy sitting from my in-laws, staple gunning with my husband, last minute “Can you help me sew a roman shade? I’ll bring coffee!”, and positive feedback from the kids.
If you want to catch up on the week-by-week progression, just click on these posts: One Room Challenge: The Beach Cabin Attic Makeover | ORC Week 2: The Beach Cabin Attic Floors | ORC Week 3: The Beach Cabin Sleeper Attic Pillows and Decor | ORC Week 4: The Beach Cabin Attic Makeover: A DIY-ish Preppy Pirate Boat | ORC Week 5: The Beach Cabin Sleeper Attic- DIY Roman Shades
To recap, this is what the attic looked like “before” we bought it…
Here was our “progress”/make it our own for the summer until we were ready to dive in…
And here is what we did…
Painted the floors and walls (which took MUCH longer than anticipated)…
Changed the bedding a bit… I kept the Pottery Barn quilts I’d been collecting over the years “just in case we ever own a cottage” and also added some duvet covers and pillows.
A sailboat for the kids… I know… This is different than the sail in my Week 3 post. My mom offered to work with a friend to make the sails look… well… more like sails, and I took her up on it in a New York minute. She even found fabric that was incredibly similar to the wallpaper pattern in my original plan for the attic. Hats off to our contractor too who did an amazing job tweaking these original Ana White plans for the sailboat!
A DIY Roman Shade… Again… different than the Week 4 post… (Yep- we’ve been busy this week.) Because the fabric I bought was so thick, the hem tape didn’t work as I had hoped in the folds. A sweet friend helped me/ I drank coffee and watched her put stitches in the folds. (Don’t worry- I bought her one too!). I’m so glad she didn’t kick me to the curb when I showed up with the folds pre-measured with paper clips to hold them in place… Plenty of paper clips around our house… not so much on the needle or safety pin front. The hem tape did, however, work great for the rod opening.
Added some local finds… I found the snowshoes at a local antique store. When my mom pulled out a drawing of a sailboat she had in storage (already framed and matted in perfect color coordination with the Beach Cabin attic), I knew it would be just thing that the far wall needed.
A Photo Wall for our memories…. (I’ll be adding more photos of our kids playing at the beach as well.) This wall was incredibly easy… I think… I was headed out to the Beach Cabin when I got a call from school that I had a sick kiddo that needed to come home. Fortunately, my parents came to the rescue, put together the gallery wall, and took a few photos of it (They’re pretty amazing!).
Mixtiles is an app for your phone. You can order 8x8s and choose different framing and style options. When they come, you simply peel off the sticky tape and place them on your wall. Done and done. (I did cheat a little and emailed some of my non-phone photos to my phone for the tiles.) 
I also added some fun pops of red to the room… so much so that I was tempted to start decorating for Christmas!
And there it is… Our Beach Cabin Sleeper Attic completed. Just in time for winter- haha! Oh well.
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Rug |Bedding |Pillows | Mixtiles
