ORC Week 4: A Birth, Lighting, & Art

Before I get to the One Room Challenge update this week, I have to share that the inhabitant of the nursery finally arrived! Juniper Eva Jacks was born on the morning of April 18, and we couldn’t be more in love with her.

If you’ve just arrived at DIY in PDX via the ORC blog, welcome! I’m Rachel, and I blog about everything DIY, from fixing up my old house, to making accessories and decor, to growing plants and cooking. But I’m currently working on my most ambitious DIY project yet: By the end of the Spring 2019 ORC I’ll have given birth to my first child. So I’ll be creating a nursery for our new little one.

This past week has been a bit of a blur, so this post is live a little later than I intended. But there’s been some good progress on the space since last week.

This week I want to share what we did for lighting in this room, and the gallery wall in progress. I’ll start with the overhead light. Here’s the before:

Not a boob light, at least, but not at all right for what I had in mind. When it came to the overhead light, I knew I wanted two things: A paper lantern, and a ceiling medallion.

So first we ordered this ceiling medallion, I painted it, and we used Liquid Nails and blue tape to glue it to the ceiling. After Steven took the old fixture down, of course.

For the paper lantern, I bought this one, and pieced together the fixture itself from a couple of sources. I used this cord set, but replaced the plastic canopy it came with with a metal one I bought locally. If I were doing it again, though, I would just order fabric-covered cord from Color Cord Company. They sell ceiling canopies, too, but the one I bought at quirky local shop Sunlan Lighting was WAY cheaper, and similar to this one.

The only thing I’m not 100% happy with is the difference in the shades of white between the ceiling canopy and the medallion. Being extremely pregnant meant climbing up on a ladder to repaint the medallion a cooler shade of white wasn’t going to happen, but I might get around to it someday.

Here’s the other lighting in the room:

I bought this tree lamp on sale at Anthropologie a million years ago, so I can’t tell you where to get one. But it definitely needs a new shade, because the one it has is pretty worn and stained. I went back and forth about a million times on whether I should DIY a new shade to replace it with, but in the end I decided I just wanted a white one, maybe this one.

Now let’s talk about the gallery wall! We found this amazing cat painting at a thrift store for $20 a few months ago, and I can’t believe I almost didn’t buy it. It bears a very strong resemblance to our cat Adventurous.

For the rest of the art, I shopped pieces from my own house that I had squirreled away. I laid them out on the floor to find the right layout, then made paper templates to transfer the layout to the wall.

The piece that’s missing will be this one. It’s my very first embroidery, and I made it with my Grandma Midge when I was 10. She was an avid cross-stitcher, and the owner of the hanging chair in the room. She was also by far the craftiest person I’ve ever met.