swingchickie | the spare bedroom is finally finished! (Reply)

after 2 years of using it as a storage room and keeping the door closed all the time because it was so ugly, i finally have a guest room/dressing room that i'm proud of.

i disliked the room for 2 big reasons:

1. it was ugly -- it had been the previous owners' baby's room, and they had done the entire color scheme in dirty blue, rose, and mustard yellow.

2. it needed a lot of work, especially because they had used thick coats of really cheap paint (and more horrors that we discovered as we started to overhaul it).

before:

general shot of the room decorated in its "storage room chic" theme. :) it's pretty much where i stored all the materials for the hula hoop business, as well as off-season clothes.

in this shot you can see the color scheme better... the photo actually makes it look more bearable than it actually was.

they had stuck almost 100 glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling, and installed a furturistic metal light fixture that didn't really go with the baby look of the rest of the room.

please, i beg of you -- don't stick glow-in-the-dark stars to your ceiling. or if you do, take them off before you sell your house. it took me and jack an entire evening to pry them off and then spackle up the holes they'd left in the ceiling paint.

this is another thing you should not do: paint over wallpaper, like the previous owners did. why? 1. you will be able to see the seams between the sheets of wallpaper even clearer. 2. the chemicals and liquid of the paint will pull some of the wallpaper adhesive through those gaps, creating pinstripe lines of glue every 18 inches along your walls. and 3. as you can see in the photo below, if the wallpaper wasn't glued on well in some areas, painting it will cause it to eventually start to peel off the wall in a chunk. sigh.

this is what happens when you use cheap paint. if you look at the pink window trim, it looks like there's a beam of light hitting part of the wood and making it a paler pink. that's not from the light -- that's where the paint faded (in only about 3 years) from the sun hitting it.

jack tearing up the carpet... the carpet was a bear to get up, not just because they had stapled it in 1,000 places but also because there were sections of carpet padding glued to the hardwoods by years of a cat peeing in the same place. it had melted the foam padding onto the wood.

the hardwoods were in pretty good shape, just a thick layer of dust left behind from the padding.

i hired a painter to come in and take care of the spackling and painting... with so many problems in the room (especially the painted-over wallpaper!) i wanted it fixed by a professional. it took the entire first day to power-sand down all those wallpaper glue seams, spackle them, sand them down again... and then do a coat of white on the trim and ceiling. but it already looked 1,000x better!

here's the after:
blue carpet gone, and walls painted pale gray and leafy green with white trim.

i got a little pull-out sofabed for when guests are in town.

on the opposite side of the room, something i've always wanted: a vanity! now i have a place to store all my makeup, and where i can do my face for a night out without straining over the bathroom sink!

the framed pix over the vanity. i've had these for years but re-framed them for the new room... they're an actual cover and inside photo from a 1943 vogue magazine.

another vogue article, i love the title of this one: "more hat whimsy"! (the picture's not crooked, my camera-taking hand was. hee.)

i love this light fixture. my ceiling is sloped so it limits what kind of lighting you can do, and i didn't want to just do something recessed... so instead i bought a plug-in pendant lamp that's more for hanging over a dining room table or in the corner in a living room, and asked jack to hard-wire it into the ceiling.