guests welcome (#17)

It gives me great, great pleasure to say that we are done with remodels.  Done.  Finished.  No more.  I love a good remodel as much as the next person but they are always inconvenient, especially now that we are a family of there (plus two dogs).

Our town puts on a tour of homes every Christmas to benefit a local family or charity.  There are usually four to five homes on the tour.  It's always lots of fun to see how different people decorate and to get to be a little nosey.

This year, we were asked to be on the tour.  I said no but after a family dropped out, I decided that there is no time like the present which brought us to our final remodel.  The guest room.

This is actually the second time our guest room as been remodeled.  When I first moved in, Daniel let me paint and we put down new carpet.  It is amazing to see how your style transforms over the year.  I don't know what I was smoking when I chose tar heel blue but it was definitely not fitting in with our decor.  Working with Jennifer has also given me confidence in my style and I decided to tackle the decorating alone.  It's really scary especially when you know half the town will be judging it.

We decided to keep the remodel simple since we didn't have much time.  We painted the walls a shade of white which meant we had to repaint the trim because the old color looked a little yellow.  We covered holes and really just tidied up.

The biggest job really was decorating.  I decided to go light and bright.  I chose a color palette of blues and greens since they were already being used in other rooms.  But my starting point really was my maps.  If you read my blog, it's obvious that we love to travel.  I had the idea to get maps of all the places we had travelled and to frame them.  I found maps that fit our color scheme and took it from there.

What's even more surprising is that I did the decorating on a budget.  Let me say that again.  I stuck to a budget.  My sister-in-law found the bed frame on clearance at World Market.  I bought the side tables from One Kings Lane and the lamps were on sale at Kirklands.  The credenza was a scratch and dent that I got half off but you can't even see the scratches.  The frames were on sale at Hobby Lobby and I painted them using paint that we already had.  I felt so thrifty!  I did get the bedding from Pottery Barn so that was a little expensive but you can't have it all.

So without further ado, here is our new guest room!

The bed and maps of France, NYC, Spain, Italy, and Paris

The credenza and a map of London (I have two more maps for this wall)

The view from the door

Since the tour of homes is Christmas-centric, I decided to do two trees.  We collect ornaments from our travels (if we can find one) and I thought a travel tree would be perfect in a room full of maps.

The travel tree

That is our room!  I love it and am so proud of it.  You would think I made a world-altering discovery.  I am really that proud and often find myself just standing in the room checking out my hard work.  Our guest room is officially open to the public!