House Before and Afters: Guest Bedroom Edition

The family that we bought our house from had a little boy and little girl.  So, of course the two extra bedrooms were painted blue and pink!  I told Trevor we should just leave them the way they are and that way we can just stick a crib in whichever room whenever we have a baby depending on if its a boy or girl :).  He didn't really go for that idea though... so we painted them a little more neutral colors.  The room that we chose to be the guest bedroom was the little boys room that was painted bright blue.

Before (blury..sorry!):

The first thing we did was find some good help! My sister and bro in law we there helping us move in and they love/are willing to help with painting and home renovation projects.  My dad helped out too and my mom was mostly on baby patrol (which also really helped out!)   After we found some good help, we painted the room a neutral beige color.  Then we ripped up the carpets and pulled out all the staples.  I wish we had pictures from this endeavor because I'm pretty sure it wasn't until way after dark that we decided Cara and Jason convinced us that the carpets were something we could tackle ourselves.  We preceded to open up the windows and chunk large loads of nasty carpets and carpet pads out the windows.  Hopefully the neighbors weren't watching... maybe thats why no one brought us cookies to welcome us to the neighborhood!  Then we thanked our help for all their hard work and sent them on their way.  We stood back to look at what we had done and wondered if we had gotten in over our heads!  We enlisted the help of our handyman Steve and his buddies that were then painting the outside of our house.  They sanded down the floors a little, refinished them, and added quarter round to the baseboards.  The room has two closets (you can see one closet door in each picture above), and one big window which made it kinda hard to arrange furniture with not too many open wall space.  We bought new furniture for the master bedroom when we moved in, so we put all of our old furniture from the apartment in here.  I'm still not completely happy with this room, but I decided to let it be for a while until I find something just right for it, instead of buying something right away just to take up empty space.  Here is what we have so far:

I promised you in the living room edition that I would show you where we had to decided to hang Trevor's other animal friend!  So now you have to come stay with us and let the Aoudad, lovingly named "Baaahhhbb", stare at you while you sleep! Sound fun?

The picture next to Baahhbb, or Bob, is a painting my dad did for me.  I took a picture on a hike in Big Sur and he used my picture to paint this beautiful seascape...I love it!  On the wall across from that painting is a bigger painting that he did, which is still on loan until I can find something else to hang there.

Speaking of my dad and his handy work, that dresser underneath Bob is my favorite garage sale find of all time.  It was bright yellow when we found it but I had my dad paint it that deep red color and antique it a little so the yellow comes through a little.

And while I'm talking about every piece in the room I might as well tell you about the bench under the window.  I was telling my good friend Sarah that we really wanted to get a bench to put under the window, and what does she show up with on our doorstep the very next day? Yep! A bench.  Thanks Sar! Now we want a puppy... see what you can do about THAT!

Hope you enjoyed our guest room, now you have to come visit us and stay in it!  If Bob staring at you all night gives you the creeps, I'm sure Trevor wouldn't mind sticking him in the closet for the night!