June 16, 2015

house tour: guest bedroom

We have summer guests coming, starting on Wednesday, so we've been scrambling to get the guest bedroom presentable! The room is in the basement and it's quite large but David has been using it as his work room for the last few months while we tried to clean out the garage. It's a really dark room since it's in the basement. The house is a split level so the basement is a walk-out, meaning it's still at a ground level, but it's really shaded and only has one small window and not a lot of light. The struggle is going to be making it feel clean and bright without doing too much work and spending very much money on it. We have lots of other projects that are eating our time and money so we are just doing the bare minimum for now.
It pains me to share these pictures without a beautiful "after" shot, but I hope that you're able to see the vision like I am! I know that some people just look at this and think we are crazy for doing this, but I've always been a huge sucker for makeovers... just ask my 7th grade Clueless-loving self. Anyway, the top picture is how the room looked when we bought it and the bottom is how it looked this weekend as we started working on it. Just like the rest of the house, the walls have a very rough texture, which drives me nuts. David is amazing and wonderful and has spent hours and hours, mudding and sanding and mudding and sanding the walls until they are smooth. I took a picture of the walls so you can see how they looked before (he had scraped them a little bit at this point with a trowel). I tried to take a picture of the walls now but it just looks like a piece of paper when I take the picture because they're smooth and beautiful now. So, just imagine for me. They look SO much better.
Here's David priming the walls and ceiling (he scraped off the popcorn ceiling throughout the whole house before we moved in). We have black (yes, black) baseboards, door casings and doors throughout the house and they are awful but we can't replace them yet so we just painted over them. We started out cutting around them nicely but after a while, we asked ourselves why we were trying to be careful with something that's going to be ripped out? It sure looks tacky now but it's just motivation to get them replaced! :)
The other gem in the room (and throughout the basement) are these floors. They are linoleum (laminate?) floors with this super groovy pattern and a faux wood border around the perimeter of the room. It's confusing, really.
Here is my plan for the room. I just bought this rug (for 70% off!) to try to hide some of the awful flooring. It's a flat weave so I can comfortably put it over carpet once we put that in. Anyway, I will post pictures as we make progress.

5 comments:

  1. I love it when you post house updates. Your home looks so lovely and spacious. My husband and I bought a house two weeks ago. There is a renter in it till the end of July (so we are actually landlords now, so weird). We get the keys July 31st and we'll be painting and such during August before officially moving in September 1st. Your posts are making me so excited! :)

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  2. It's shaping up nicely! Can't wait to see

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  3. Love to see the progress on your home and your plan for what it will become!

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