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.