3-Season Room Remodel | The Design Process

Part One – The Basics

To get up-to-speed on the house purchase, our 3-season room remodel and who Victoria is, read the intro post. A quick recap: we purchased our home in Southeastern, Wisconsin a few months after our fall 2019 wedding. As a couple working in the home improvement industry, we can’t help but want to update everything in our house. Even though we really don’t need to do much, at all. The house was move-in ready. I’ve considered a 3-season room, a space our new home included, a luxury I’d never have– until now. Fast forward to the pandemic, and we connect with Victoria at Formed Living. We worked with her to design our modern, Scandinavian-inspired oasis.

Starting in spring 2020, the pandemic was in full swing. Thankfully Victoria offered to complete this process mainly virtually (an angel, right?!). She asked us to compile some basic information, like photos, measurements, design & function aspirations/goals and a Pinterest vision board. At a high level, we asked for:

Design styles: Minimalist | Scandinavian | Modern | A touch of Industrial
Room function: Relaxing | Eating | Storage
Key words: Cozy | Airy | Bright | Refreshing | Nature
What we don’t like: Farmhouse | Wicker furniture

We knew we were keeping the room basics to minimize scope, such as doors, brick wall, windows, paint color. Everything else was up for grabs. Check out photos from one of our pre-move-in walk-throughs. While technically nothing was “wrong” with the 3-seasons room, we seized the opportunity to update it when we realized we’d want to spend as much time in there as possible. What’s neat is that the brick wall is technically the original exterior of the house.

Part Two – The First Look

We met to discuss our initial inputs, and from there, Victoria balanced our requests and her expertise. Then, we met to review the first set of renderings as well as a mood board– beautiful, by the way. The space came to life through these, and we skipped the floor plan stage entirely (you don’t have to do this, for what it’s worth). In her designs, she nailed that we needed depth with color. If Eugene had it his way, everything would be white. She set the space up to include three sections- lounging, storage and a breakfast nook. Take a peek at some of the initial renderings:

Part Three – The Flooring

Oh, and we were desperate for a quarantine project and got Victoria’s permission to speed up the flooring process. Fun fact: We installed the flooring before we even saw the final renders. Talk about risky business. Victoria embraced the urgency on the floor with grace– we met at Menards to pick it out. Again, she’s an angel and spent a good 45 minutes with me looking at our options. In the end, we went with a lighter-toned luxury vinyl plank floor. Thank goodness we finally got to get rid of the tile carpet squares.

Part Four – The Final Design

Headline- Even though the updates on our end aren’t complete, I’ve spent every possible minute in this room and owe it to Victoria. She poured lots of time, energy and love into this, and I am so thankful. Victoria took our preliminary feedback into consideration and designed the 3-season room of our dreams. The room flows perfectly and even takes into consideration the idea of needing more storage for kiddos one day ;), something I didn’t even direct her on. She was proactive and intuitive to our needs. Her expertise really shined through in this project.

For instance, something so small but has made the largest difference for the room: CURTAINS. Never would I have thought to put curtains on the windows closest to the interior of the house, instead of on the exterior-facing windows. It created privacy we never had (I swear to you, people walking our street enjoy my nightly dance routine while making dinner… our sliding glass door from the kitchen to the 3-season room never had curtains…). In addition to adding privacy, those curtains elevate the room and add coziness against the original brick wall. Because Eugene is such a sucker for white in home design & decor, Victoria found subtle ways to dash color into our room, such as through pillows and rugs. Bless you, V.

The last, and my favorite, call she made was to introduce regular floor & table lamps. If I had to do this by myself, I probably would have only installed string lights across the ceiling. That’s because that’s what the original owners did. Don’t sue me. A few things we asked for from the original renders to the final look: consider a lighter curtain color, add other shelving options, create a nook for the breakfast area and also have the ability to add an HVAC unit in the future.

Additionally, one of the best parts about working with Victoria is receiving the product list AT THE SAME TIME as the final renders. She added easy-to-use links and photos of products she recommended we use. Bam. Just like that, we were ready to swipe our credit cards. Even better, she realizes that people are on budgets, things go out of stock or people may not stick to the design all the way. She gave us a few insights if we’d only end up using parts of the design, which was thoughtful.