a room for our guests

We (mostly) finished the guest room just in time for my parents' visit over the weekend. There are still a few things left, like painting the inside of the closet and staining the baseboards that were hidden behind the shelves to match the rest of the woodwork. But, for the most part, it is done and it makes me happy to be able to check another room off the list. Here is the before, complete with "built-in" shelves and the green vertical blinds with matching ceiling fan:

That door is to the closet.

After clearing out the room and patching the walls, the first thing we did was paint the radiator. It was the last radiator that needed to be painted in the whole house! Yay! It was yellow before.
Then we had to do some electrical, um, investigating... The green ceiling fan never worked so we had to do some testing to see if it was the fan, or the wiring, or? Turns out that one of the old wires was broken up in the ceiling, luckily we were able to reach in and fix it. We're not going to talk about how Mike shocked himself while up on the ladder or how I had a small fireball come out of the wall switch while I was holding a piece of metal up to the wires. Nope, not going to talk about it. Good news is that it now works :-)
After much debate, we decided to go with another ceiling fan. Normally I'm not a big fan of fans (hehe) but we couldn't afford some of the other lights that we liked. And I really do like fans in bedrooms while I'm trying to sleep.

You can see that we started painting in the picture above. When I first started thinking about the guest room I really wanted to have nice light neutral bedding with a dark color on the walls. The furniture we had for this room was light wood tones, I thought it would contrast nicely with darker walls. Then our friends gave us their extra bed frame (light colored) and I found all white bedding... so I picked the most perfect shade of dark blue, Rainstorm by Sherwin Williams, and had Lowes color match since SW wasn't open when I was ready to paint. I had to go back and forth to Lowes a few times because they really messed up the color match the first time and I ended up with bright aqua. Yikes! Mike was nervous, I don't think he was fully agreeable to painting the room so dark. But now with the white duvet, white curtains, and light furniture in place, he really likes it (or at least that's what he told me). I love it, the room gets a lot of natural light from the big front window so it still is very bright during the day. I think it looks very calm and relaxing, even though the walls are dark. It makes the bed and the big window become the focus of the room. I realize that some people might not like it as much as I do though, I think Mom's words were "wow, that's an, um, interesting, color choice..."
This is my favorite picture, I think the white radiator looks especially beautiful against the dark wall :-)

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3 Responses to a room for our guests

Rachel said...

Ooh, I love the last picture.

I like the color! I'm a big fan of contrast, so I think the room looks great :)

Bunny @ 86n It said...

Looks terrific!
I have been waiting this post, having also just painted a bedroom dark. I love the color choice. Looks fab.

Lou said...

I love the contrast of the white against the dark colour- as long as you keep the room simple and clutter-free it should work well.

Given your recent 'electrical' experience, I now understand why it is illegal to do your own electrical work in Australia. You must use a qualified electrician here.

If you suddenly 'disappear' from this blog, I think we'll know why! Just make sure you wear rubber shoes and gloves in future...

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