Thursday, May 5, 2011

Guest House: Done! (for now)

Since our first guests are rolling into town tonight, now seemed like as good a time as any to finish setting up the guest house.

Painting ended up taking for-ev-er.  We had to do 2 coats of white paint, which was fine and totally expected, but the detail work was very tedious.  Lots of windows means lots of trim and paintbrush work.  Which means lots of me looking around the room at the unfinished trim and wanting to drown myself in a can of paint. 

For the white paint we used Home Depot/Glidden's Freshaire paint, the same stuff we used to paint the trim in the house.  We literally have about 10 gallons of this stuff because it was discontinued and went on sale for $5 a gallon.  The only problem is that I discovered later that they also discontinued the special colorant to tint the paint, so we're stuck with white for now.  Anyhow, as it turns out, it works just fine when you wanted to paint a room white!  And $5 a gallon means that I believe this whole painting project cost us under $30 (the primer was full price).  We used just about the full gallon of primer, just about a gallon of white eggshell paint, and a bit of semi-gloss for the trim.

I used eggshell finish for the walls and semi-gloss for the trim.  Except for an unfortunate incident where I mixed up the cans while doing touch-ups, so there are stripes of shiny paint all over the walls in half of the room.  I was going to fix it, then I realized I was sick of painting.

So, we finished painting a few days ago, let it air out for a few days (the Freshaire actually doesn't have much of a smell, but just to be safe), and moved the in furniture last night. 

I should note that we're still looking for a lot more furniture, but since we're craigslisting it we just have to wait for things to turn up that work.  I'd love to get a small round kitchen table for the chairs, and maybe some comfy slipper chairs to round out the room.  And some artwork/decorative accents/curtains.  It's a little spartan for now but our houseguests this weekend told us they'd sleep on the floor if they had to so hopefully they'll be ok with it!

Without further ado:


Excuse the wrinkled bedding, it was in storage.

Two lonely chairs ($10 each on craigslist!) waiting for a table to call their own.

I'd like to replace the old metal blinds with...something else.  That something else might just be white miniblinds because they're budget-friendly, but we'll see what I can come up with.  Also toying with the idea of curtains.

 Bed ($80 on craigslist, mattress we owned already...craigslist mattresses are icky), already owned bedding, already owned nightstands that I'd like to replace with vintage-looking ones eventually.

The bed kind of blocks the fireplace, but there's really nowhere else to put it that makes sense.  Unless we do a sofa bed/futon which we've toyed with.

Kitchenette is pretty much the same.

This ceiling lamp will also be replaced, eventually.

Other side of the room.  I'd like to put some kind of furniture in the empty middle space, I'm just not sure what.


 Bathroom pictures - not very exciting - but Sean was in charge of bathroom design and I'm proud of his choices.  The man knows his Bed Bath and Beyond, what can I say.

Semi-opaque shower curtain since the shower is kind of small and coffin-like which is not the feeling we'd like to create for our guests.

 Ooo toilet pics!  The wallpaper in here is kind of meh, but we have other projects to tackle before taking it on...like the wallpaper in the main house.

 Cute vintage-looking light pull Sean picked out.  It was previously a ratty piece of string, this is much nicer.

So - that's the guest house!  I'm sure it'll evolve from here but I'm super happy with how the painted wood panelling turned out.  We're taking our time finding furniture and accent pieces so it may take a while, but I'm very happy to have a nice little space to offer guests for now.

RIP wood panelling.  1937-2011.


1 comment:

  1. WOW! What an absolutely charming space! Great job sprucing it up too. Bravo! :-)

    ReplyDelete