Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Be Our Guest

I thought long and hard (like, a full 3 minutes) about what to do my first real post about... seeing as how we've been at this house thing for 6 months already we've got quite a backlog of projects I could write about. I finally landed on our basement guest bedroom, because it was one of the first projects we got 100% complete (it might actually still be one of our only projects that is 100% complete), and that we have the most pictures of.  So guest bedroom it is!

Something I am still learning is the value of BEFORE pictures. Many of these first posts will require imagination to picture what things looked like before we got our hands on them, because I just plain didn't think to take pictures before we got started. So I apologize for that. Lesson learned.  This is one of those times, so get your imagining caps on.

Picture a basement bedroom, white walls, blue carpet, empty. Pretty much a blank slate.

And here is the after...

 Ta da! The furniture is all our old bedroom furniture (that I've had for 5 years now), that we decided to put in the guest room in hopes of eventually upgrading to some better furniture in the master bedroom (which has yet to happen, except for some thrifted furniture that is still taking up residence in the garage).  The sheets came from Target and the art above the bed came from HomeGoods.  The lamps were Phil's from a long time ago, that actually had been moved around from apartment to apartment and never really used.  They were originally silver with wood accents, but I spray painted the wooden parts white so they would match better (and just be less fugly in general).
 See those grey/silver mini blinds? They came with the house (score!), and in any other context they'd be awful. But they actually ended up working serendipitously with the yellow and gray color scheme I had in mind.  As for how I came up with the color scheme, I think I just saw the colors together in a picture somewhere or something, and loved it. I thought yellow was a great color for the basement (it makes it so bright!), and pairing it with the dark wood furniture and gray accents made it feel less grandma-y.
All of those accessories are also from HomeGoods, and cost us a whopping $0 thanks to a collection of gift cards we accumulated (my birthday + closing on our first house = an influx of generous house related gifts from family and friends).

So there you have it! It might seem random to have our guest bedroom be one of the first projects tackled, but we had a slew of house guests over the summer, so we wanted to be able to provide them with a finished space to stay in. The guest bathroom in the basement is also 100% complete (well, aside from some upgrades we'd like to tackle way down the line), but I have yet to take a single picture of that room, so you will have to wait (with bated breath, I'm sure) to see that one.

LESSON(S) LEARNED: Take before pictures! Oh, and enlisting your rock star friends is a great way to get projects banged out in no time (props to MEGAN for helping me paint this room AND the guest bathroom all in one day!!).

So who's coming for a visit next?! As you can see, we are perpetually ready for guests! Come on over! ;)

6 comments:

  1. That looks great! A sleepover needs to happen soon. So long as I get 24 hours advanced notice before said crashing at your place, I'm good to go! We could play Bang all night long! (That sounds so wrong...)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. An all night Bang marathon?! Sounds devine! (And you're right, it does sound very wrong, haha). You know you guys are welcome anytime!

      Delete
    2. Doesn't sound as wrong as "Bang marathon." :)

      Delete
    3. Oh, Linhhai, don't be jealous! Our guest room is particularly yearning for you and Lisa to live in it for a while, by the way. It told me so. <3

      Delete
  2. Love it!! Maybe I can try and search for some photos from the listing before you bought it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks! Let me know if you find any! Particularly of the basement, that seems to be the one area we didn't get any before shots of for whatever reason!

      Delete