Making a House a Home: Guest Room

The third post in our Making a House a Home series did not take as long, partly because I have been working on the house like crazy while trying to get over our recent loss. (I have been about to drive my husband crazy!) The room featured this time is the Guest Room! As we live in a vacation area, we typically have a lot of guests, particularly during the summer months. (Although this year we haven't had hardly any. Probably due to the recession.) For now we have found it convenient to have a guest room. Eventually I will probably loose our guest room to children, but hopefully not for a while! Overall, we estimate that we spent a total of about $40 on this room. These are pictures of the room before we moved in.




Once we bought the house, I immediately started figuring out where we were going to put the furniture. We decided to put the furniture that had been in our bedroom (before we made the rope bed) in the guest room. The furniture had originally belonged to my great-grandmother, and the mattress and box springs had been my parents when they got married! It was definitely time to retire these pieces to less heavy duty usage! The next thing I started thinking about was what other items I wanted to go in the guest room. Since we were not going to be using the full size bedding on our new bed, I already had a color scheme: yellow and blue.

One of the pictures I bought as a souvenir while on vacation, and the other a friend painted as a wedding present.

The first thing we did upon moving in was repaint the room. All of the paint jobs in the house were sloppy, but this room was just awful! They had not used a primer on the dry wall so the paint started peeling on the wall in sheets taking dry wall with it! We ended up have to patch the walls, spray texture over the patches, primer twice because some of the previous paint was very dark, and paint a coat or two of the new color! It was very frustrating and took quite a while! We ended up painting the room a light yellow to go with the bedding and hopefully enlarge the room. As I have said before, I like to use variants of the primary colors in my house because just about every color will go with them! We also decided to put up crown molding as it is hard to avoid painting the ceiling when you have a popcorn ceiling! David once again did a very nice job on that!


Now it was time to start adding the finishing touches! My mother had made some lace curtains for the room we got married in, so I hung those over some light blue blackout curtains I had gotten on clearance at Wal-mart for $20. The curtains looked more like shower curtains, but they do their job (keep out light and help with temperature control) and look much nicer with the lace curtains on top! Since the room already had an antique feel to it, I added an antique chair I plan to reupholster some day, a quilt rack with afgans made by relatives, and an old hurricane lamp. I decided to add some seashells since it is a guest room near the coast! We also took apart her ceiling fan and spray painted the brass parts. It turned out great and very economical! This is the second ceiling fan I have done. As I have said before we are replacing all of the blinds and door knobs in the house, and I have not included that in the price of the redo. (Although you can see from the pictures I still have to repaint the doors and change the doorknobs. Maybe next week...)


I am pleased with what we have done with this room, but my favorite part is storage space! In this area of the country we have to be very careful about where we store things because of intense heat and hurricanes; therefore, I decided to store Jessica's old baby clothes in the dresser organized by age so it will be easier access as we have other children! I also stored old clothes under the bed to be used for later sewing projects, and I put all of our camping gear in the top of the closet. So much storage space and yet it still doesn't look cluttered!!