Guest Room 101

Every guest room must be equipped with:

A bed.
A place to sit.
A place to put some stuff.
Books.

Our guest room was probably the least offensive original color. 

 

The cobalt blue wasn't too bad.  What was bad?  The amount of paint on that poor ceiling.  And, the thick, gloopiness of the paint.  It was so thick it was cracking and peeling off. 

It was the second room we painted, but this was the color that took the longest to grown on me.  After we were done, I wasn't sure about it.   

The color was called Key Lime.  It had more of an electric tone than I was prepared for, but after we added the bed and some accessories, it got much, much better.

Now, future guests will have a place to sleep.  Eventually, the bookcase will be refinished and stocked and a reading chair will be available.

But, Chez Riley is now open enough for business. 

Just try to withhold judgment on the bathroom...we'll be starting on the bathroom in January.

A Time to Remodel

One of the main reasons I haven't been doing much baking or blogging these days is that 90% of my free time has gone into remodeling our house.

We bought a house built in 1917 and have slowly been trying to reverse the years of poor care and maintenance.

For today, I'll begin with the first room we redid.  John's office was an upstairs bedroom that very obviously belonged to a girl in love with Pink and Purple:

Not only was the room pink AND purple, it was shiny.  And they painted over the light switch and outlet covers and the switches and outlets themselves.  This room was the first room we painted and we soon realized that it was the start of many, many weekends and nights spent painting.

One bonus for all of the main rooms?  It came with beautiful, knotty pine ceilings.  The drawback?  The previous owners got paint all over them.  So we've had to slowly sand out the mistakes, re-stain and re-polyurethane each spot.

But all for a good cause:

After 2 days of painting, we have a nice, neutral soothing room in Gentle Rain (basically a dove gray), that suits John very nicely.

This room will be revisited after we get the art on the walls and the new floor down.  I don't really want to highlight the awful berber carpet we have going on right now.