Serenity B & B
The bear and I LOVE to host. We love it so much that we made it a priority to create a guest room that feels like a boutique hotel for our over night visitors, complete with in-room coffee maker. When we bought the house, this room had great potential, but a long way to go before it became anything special.
In order to keep my sanity, I redid each room top to bottom one at a time to contain the crazy-making mess. I am not a methodical person by nature, but even I had to rein in the chaos to get through the renovation, so I developed a simple routine:
Day 1: Scrape popcorn in the morning, re-texture the ceiling in the afternoon.
Day 2: Prime the ceiling in the morning, paint it in the afternoon
Day 3: Paint the walls
Day 4: Paint the trim
Day 5: Flooring (Home Depot put in the carpet – that’s something I have zero inclination to tackle.)
Day 6: Collapse in a heap and watch Gilmore Girls all day.
After all that (and putting up curtains, art, furnishings), we had this.
It was better, but not magical. When I found an adorable French provincial dresser on OfferUp, it came with a coordinating side table. I had no plan for it at the time, but the idea finally occurred to me to try switching out the side tables, so I began the process of hunting for another one to match. The secondary market came through for me pretty quickly.
Better, still not great. I thought the solution might be spicing up the other side of the room. I added a cute chair, some contact paper behind the built-in desk area, and some styling to the bookshelves.
Getting closer, but still no rainbow sparkles. I racked my brain. Was it the curtains? The bedding? The curtains and the bedding? Some of you may have been jumping up and down yelling “the paint color!!” ever since you saw the first “after” picture. I was in denial. This was my line of thought in choosing that particular color: I had read that using multiple paint colors in a house can make transitioning from one room to another a bit choppy, so to minimize that effect while still differentiating the spaces, I picked neutrals off the same swatch for the living room, dining room, hallway, and bedrooms. The color I chose for the bedroom was Vanilla Sugar by Sherwin Williams. I thought, “How lovely! I want Vanilla Sugar on my walls!” I didn’t realize it was beige. It just seemed like a very nice neutral at the time. And to be fair, it is a nice neutral, it just didn’t get along with my textiles. Since paint is way less expensive than new curtains and bedding, I opted for the cheaper choice.
Cue weeks of agonizing over minutely differing shades of light blue. I didn’t want it to feel like a nursery, but I didn’t want it to be an obvious blue. There was also a time constraint: every Labor Day, Memorial Day, and Independence Day, the big box stores in my area run $10 off per gallon paint specials and Labor Day was fast approaching. Cheapskate that I am, time was of the essence. The winner was Waterfall by Behr.
I don’t have any pictures of the room before I added the new accessories, but suffice it to say, the new color played so well with the textiles that it was too blue, too monochromatic. Finding the white throw blanket and switching out the throw pillows went a long way toward remedying the situation, but didn’t give the room much character. What else could I do? Lanterns? Nope, I had done that already in other rooms and I was starting to feel like a one trick pony. A really tall plant? Also, no: I had seen that done too many times to feel excited about it. Bird cages! Ok, so people use bird cages as decor all the time, but do they have wisteria and ivy trailing out of them? I also needed something to go on the wall with the window, so I continued the wisteria and ivy theme. Some simple metal wall planters found on OfferUp fit into my scheme perfectly.
Now we have a space that we are delighted to invite guests into. And it only took 3 1/2 years to put together.