Guest Room Revisted

Goodness, we are long overdue an update on what's happening around here! I have several projects 99% finished but waiting on that 1% before I share them. (I think I have a problem with project completion.) I'm currently working on a bigger project and it is consuming a lot of my time because I have a deadline of sorts. I have a friend getting married the beginning of May and we will be hosting guests over the wedding. This project needs completed before then because it's the GUEST ROOM.

Over four years ago when I began blogging (completely on a whim), I shared about the Victorian Room which is our guest room. The room had been redone for several years before I shared it. It was redone before we lost our little girl. When I did the room, I had dreams of it being a little girl's room someday. God saw fit to take our little girl to Heaven and give her a MUCH BETTER room. Time went by and I got the itch to redo the room and make it a combination guest room and sewing room. It might seem ridiculous to some that I am redoing a room so soon when there are other rooms that need it worse but it was a painful reminder to me of the girl I'll (likely) never have.

For over a year I gathered ideas and began making purchases when items I wanted would go on a good sale. I wanted a neutral room so I could change out accessories when I got the urge to change it up. I love the navy and green color combination. Interestingly, a Pinterest search didn't yield much with that color combo for a room. The one room that came up led me to a really neat blog: rooms FOR rent. This is not the way her living room currently looks but I liked the color combination. I wanted these colors but less of them. I have yet to put my room together so I don't know if I'll achieve my vision. I encourage you to visit Bre's blog if you like farmhouse style. She's got some great ideas!

Source

Back to the guest room. Like I said, I've been planning this makeover for over a year. When my friend announced that she was getting married, I decided that was my deadline. I wanted to have it finished before her wedding. Hubby was already on board for a redo so it was just up to me to decide when. As if in confirmation that the timing was right, one of the groom's cousins contacted me about staying here over the wedding.

Since I had redone the room about 6 years ago, I thought it would be a simple matter of just pulling off the 'easy to remove' wallpaper I had hung and I would be painting in no time. I should have known better since nothing is that easy in this house. I THOUGHT when I had removed the wallpaper the first time I redid the room that I had taken it down to drywall. But when I started peeling off the wallpaper this time, I discovered that there was actually old wallpaper under the paint. Ugh! And to make it worse, they had never primed the drywall before hanging the wallpaper so it was like peeling paper off of paper. So I painstakingly worked at it and was able to get most of it off without damaging the drywall. There was a patch on one wall that the paper came off the drywall when I peeled the wallpaper off. I had a lot of repairing to do to the spackling because when I soaked the wallpaper to get it off, it softened the original spackling on the nail holes and joints. FINALLY, after a lot of work, I was ready to paint.

I ran into another problem when I pulled up the nasty pink carpet. Instead of carpet padding underneath like I expected, there was another older layer of nasty pink carpet. EWWW! And this layer had the the black foam backing that had literally glued itself to the plywood subfloor. I scraped the whole thing with a scraper but there was still a fair amount of foam so I started in with a wire brush. My arm got tired after about 1/4 of the way through so my DH finished it for me while I followed him around with the shop vac. Then I was ready to try my hand at laying vinyl plank flooring. There was a small learning curve but it was very easy. The hardest part was being down on the floor. This old lady got pretty sore. :)

My facebook followers already saw a sneak peak but here is one for those who didn't see it:

This old farmhouse has mostly wide, old pine trim but for some reason, this room didn't. I searched online (craiglist, etc.) for someone with some for sale that would match but came up empty-handed. Since it is a fairly simple design, DH said he could make me some at Uncle's cabinet shop. He whipped it out in no time yesterday and I painted it last night. I'm hoping to get it installed tomorrow. I'm excited to see it coming together! I'll share more in a later post.

Before I go, I want to share a list of the 99% completed projects so I'm accountable to get them finished. My goal is to finish them all this summer. Here is the list:

• Kitchen Island
• Main bathroom (HOW long ago did I start that?!)
• Pantry
• A few furniture makeovers

Thanks for reading! Have a great day!



From the farmhouse,