Guest Room: Part 2

The big news around here is that today we found out we are having a girl! We are very excited.

But on back to the guest room. Last time I discussed the stripes on the wall. This time it's all about the furniture. Mainly the free furniture that got refinished for this room.

When Jeff and I lived in an apartment we found a chair out by the dumpster. I thought "I could refinish that chair. It's a perfectly good chair." But it sat in our apartment for 2 years and never got refinished or sat on because it had nails sticking out of the seat.


Last summer I finally refinished it. I sanded it down and painted most of it black, save for the detail on the back which got painted with the same green used as a stripe on the walls. I then used a high-gloss polyurethane coat to protect it.

The chair pad got trashed, but I saved the wooden seat. I bought a new pad at JoAnn's, cut it to size and stapled some quilting fabric (also from JoAnn's) to the seat. And voila.


Then one day shortly after we moved to our house we were driving through an adjacent rich neighborhood and I saw this nightstand on the side of the road. It was just my style. We are now officially the type of people who dumpster dive and pick through people's trash on the side of the road.


I used the same technique as the chair; sanded, painted, polyurethaned. The wood probably could have been refinished to look really pretty, but I wanted it to match the chair and I wanted a kind of high-gloss mod look.


(Note: I framed a little extra piece of fabric from the chair to hang on the wall to tie it all together)

I love the custom and consistent look of the furniture in this room. The styles are different, but I love that slightly eclectic look.

Guest Room: Part 1

Eventually our third bedroom/office will become the nursery, so our computer and desk will have to move into the current guest bedroom.

Parts 1 and 2 will show where the guest room currently is, and Part 3 will be where it ends up once it's a guest room and an office.

When we moved in the guest room looked like this:


The first things we did were to paint over the peachy/peptobismal color with a light grayish blue. Then I primed and painted the closet doors as they are the first thing you see when you enter the room.

The inspiration for the colors of the guest room came from this bedding from CB2 (which I don't think is available any more).

After painting the room blue, I had a mishap while patching some holes in the wall. I accidentally painted over the spackle with semi-gloss paint while the base coat had been matte. Suddenly I had these shiny spots all over the walls. I considered buying more matte paint and repainting, until I realized that was just an obvious way of fixing my problem. What if, every where there is a shiny spot, I painted a stripe in a bold color? Yeah, maybe not the easiest approach, but it sounded way more fun than the alternative.

So I set out to paint stripes as a headboard for the guest bed to coordinate with the bedding. I considered doing it only in one area directly behind the bed, but I knew that we might want to shift the bed along the wall one day and not be married to that one particular location. So I committed to striping the whole wall.

I drew level vertical lines on the wall and then taped them off. I know people swear by frog tape to assure there is no bleeding, but this method worked for me: I used standard blue painter's tape, then I scraped over the tape with a spatula to ensure it was really on there. I had no problem with bleeding.

Once the tape was up, I took the paint chips of my colors and cut them into small strips. I used the strips to mark which stripes would be which color to make sure it looked random enough. When I was satisfied I started painting.

This is the point at which Jeff came home from work and was a little surprised to see what I had been up to all day.

I love how it turned out. It's unique and playful and catches visitor's eyes.