Vintage Military-Inspired Home Office DIY

What is the One Room Challenge? 

For those of you that are not familiar with the One Room Challenge or the ORC as it is often referred to, it is a bi-annual event hosted by Linda at Calling it Home and media partner Apartment Therapy where bloggers, designers and content creators are challenged to make over a room in eight weeks and provide weekly updates. I’m excited and of course, a little nervous about it. Fortunately this time my design plan is a little more simple. I will still need Doug’s carpentry skills but we’ve proven that we can do just about anything once we put our minds to it.

Doug and I have been wanting to tackle our bedroom and bathroom for several years and originally it was my intention to do those rooms for the challenge. But life had a different plan and so here we are! 

Doug has recently switched jobs and now works remotely. If you will recall, we built my home office last year.  Well, this year it’s his turn!  We are turning another bedroom into a home office and like last time, we still need to be able to use the bedroom at the holidays for guests.  Are you thinking we should build another Murphy bed?!  We talked about it but decided that we just didn’t have the chutzpah to pull off that kind of project since Doug’s just started a new job.  When he was teaching school, he had more time off during the summer. We also decided that two Murphy beds in one house might be a bit much. 

This office will definitely have a more masculine feel to it. We plan to paint the walls a gorgeous shade of blue. They are currently Hale Navy which is a great color but Doug finds them a little too dark for his taste, so we are going to lighten them up a little.  Doug has lots of cool stuff from his Army days and so we plan to make this a vintage-inspired military command center while still keeping it cohesive with the rest of the house. 

This first week, I’ve put together a mood board and we are starting to clean out the room. We decided this go around that we would rent a storage unit to keep the house tidy. If you’re anything like us, the project tends to creep into other rooms and we didn’t want that. I still have some of the items we cleaned out of my office and I’ve got to make a decision on whether to use them, sell or donate them.