Guestroom!

Before Spring Break started, I knew that I wanted to accomplish some sort of home improvement project before going back to school.  Since the first part of the week was spent in Colorado, I really only had a couple of days to pick which project I wanted to get done in the next 48 hours.  Since we've been in our house, we have painted the basement, kitchen/dining room, basement bathroom, our main floor bathroom, and the unfinished storage room (soon-to-be office space that included painting the walls and the floor).  Originally each of the rooms were a standard beige color (we're pretty sure that the previous owner hired painters just before putting the house on the market, and painted every room the same), except for the basement, which was the yucky fake wood paneling.  Since I believe that the easiest way to make a big change for little moola in the shortest amount of time is to throw a new color on the wall, I decided to paint the guest bedroom. 

Here's a reminder of what the room looked like before:

On Saturday, Luke and I took a trip to Home Depot and Menards to pick up some much needed items for our projects (Luke's working on finishing the ceiling in the old storage room.  More on that when it's closer to being completed!).  Originally, I went in there thinking that I wanted to go with Behr's Shale Grey (kind of a brighter blueish grey), but after some deliberating in the paint chip aisle, I walked away with 2 gallons of Glidden's French Grey, which was a much bolder color that I had intended getting!  We couldn't remember if we had any rollers left or if we had any clean paint trays around, so we went home to tally up our supplies and planned to come back the next day for the rest of our necessities.

Sunday morning was spent at Menards, picking up a short handled brush, a wide paint tray, a new roller brush, painter's plastic and more Frog Tape.  As soon as we got to the house, I jumped right into getting the room prepped and taped, and I was painting by 2.  Getting both coats on took me until about 7:30 Sunday night, with only brief breaks for snacks and fresh air.  In the end, I was very pleased with the results!  As for the trim, Luke and I have decided to keep the oak trim the way it is, despite the fact that we know that the room would look even better with crisp white trim.  We just haven't figured out if it would be too weird to have just one room with white trim, while the rest of the main floor has oak.  Since this will be a kid's room eventually (provided that we're still in this house when we have kids), our opinion might change by then.

After shots (be warned, some of the shots do not show the true color of the paint.  For some reason, some of the pictures show the French Grey as brighter than it really is)

In progress

In progress

Immediately after the tape came off, but before the outlet plates were put back on.

To the left of the craft table is where the photo collage will go!

The bedding definitely doesn't match the walls as much as they seem to here...  A nice white bed frame will also help contrast and define the colors!

This picture captures the color the best.

Ugly light fixture that will also need to go...

View from the hallway.  Any ideas as to what we should put on that wall of the guestroom?

The next steps are to buy a new white bed frame (IKEA, here we come!), a queen sized mattress and to create a frame collage thing on the wall next to the closet.  The plan is to start off by printing some of my youngest sister's photography work and put in in white frames and then going from there.

As of right now, this is one of my favorite rooms in the house now to just sit and catch up on emails, read, etc.   I just can't get over how much I love the color!