Be Our Guest! Please.

We have a four bedroom house, which is way more space than we currently need. We use the two bedrooms on the main floor as our room and a small office for Sam, and then on the second floor we use the other two rooms as my craft room (ie hoarding space) and our main guest room. Being able to host guests more comfortably is one thing we were most excited about when we bought our house, so we’re so glad to have this dedicated space right now for occasional overnight guests.

We have some big long-term hopes for the two upstairs bedrooms — including adding a dormer for a second bathroom and relocating the master bedroom into the current craft room — and so I’ve been slow to do much with the spaces because we don’t know how long we’ll be living with them (we need to get a contractor out to look at the space and give us an estimate so we know how long it will take to save up for it).

But we have some exciting shorter-term news that may impact our use of the space for now: Sam’s younger sister (my sister-in-law), who is 22 and currently spending a year in Chad teaching at an orphanage, may be coming to live with us for awhile starting in August!

She’s trying to figure out what she wants to do life-wise when she gets back, which as you can imagine is hard while located so far away and without a lot of communication channels like reliable phone and internet. We’ve been trying to convince her to come live with us for bit in Boston while she figures it out, and she seems intrigued. Boston has a lot of job and educational opportunities, so we just feel like it could be a good place for her to land while she thinks about her longer term plans. And now I’ve shared the idea on the internet, so she basically has to do it.

This might seem strange to those of you who know how much Sam and I love our privacy, and it’s kind of surprising to us too how enthusiastic we both are about the possibility. She’s just that awesome. And also, I may have a devious plan to enlist her in home improvement manual labor. Just maybe.

Anyway, that means that I have my eye on making the guest room a better space for longer term occupation. (Granted she’s been living in an orphanage in Chad, so I’m not sure where her standards are right now but we may break all expectations just by putting an air conditioner in her room.)

Currently, the room is furnished with:

• A double bed frame that the seller left behind
• A box spring from my friend
• A futon we had already (We originally had a mattress from the same friend who gave us the box spring, but it was exceeeeedingly uncomfortable and then she revealed to me that it was forty years old. FORTY YEARS. It was her mother’s before her mother got married.)
• A blue dresser that we found at a yard sale for $40
• Two side tables from IKEA for $15 each, with lamps left behind by the seller
• An amazing incredible thrift store lamp that yours truly made over for our first ever Plaster & Disaster post

It’s really very functional already. We have the dresser for storage, plus a big closet that we currently use to store games and suitcases but could easily accommodate clothing along the bar.

And we have this handy dandy sign with the wifi info, which pinterest tells me is a requirement for a perfect guest room.

Really, what more could a bedroom need?

But it’s really not that pretty. Even the nicer things — like the dresser and my awesome super incredible lamp — clash with one another and with the blue walls. The blue walls with flowered contact paper on them, if you didn’t catch that.

So what do I want to do before Maddie (possibly) moves in?

Well, firstly I would love to paint. I’m tired just thinking about it. But I would love this to be a bright white space maybe with an accent wall along the windows. Please feel free to leave irate comments about how I’m proposing painting all the natural wood, but it’s just not my style or the style of this house. It’s like a little log cabin room, which just feels strange given the rest of the house. But white is so nice, it could look like this!

Or this!

If only Maddie could paint her own room before arriving….

I’d also love to have fun with that bedframe — maybe paint it a bold color like the image below, or perhaps upholster the headboard.

Again, everyone is probably freaking out about painting the wood. Maybe I’ll love the natural color once the walls are lighter, and will decide to leave it. Everyone calm down.

I’d also like to add a chair in the far corner, next to the dresser. We have a rocker that I think might work well, though I’d want to recover it to have a better seat cushion and maybe stain the wood darker. I tried to recover it a few years ago, but I had a lot of trouble with the T-shaped bottom cushion because I’d just started sewing, and then I tried to use a normal pillow instead but had so little fabric left that the pillow is ridiculously small and the whole thing is absurd and embarrassing.

I can’t believe I have it in my living room right now, but I need something to balance out The Chair while I search for another perfect chair. But for you, Maddie, I’d move it prematurely.

Here’s a mock-up I put together showing all these changes:

Just kidding, that’s obviously someone else’s awesome attic bedroom. But it’s actually laid out pretty similarly to mine, and it’s what I’ll keep picturing as I psych myself up for the many many (many) hours of painting this room will require.

So what do you think? What does this room need to be the perfect space to entice a worldly 22-year old to come live with her lame old brother and sister-in-law in the suburbs?

(UPDATE: Make sure to check out what we actually did in the space — Part I and Part II!)

(Sharing at Two Uses Tuesday, One Project at a Time, Whimsy Wednesday, AKA Design, and Tip Me Tuesday,)