We’ve been busy around here at the Jewel of the Prairie, sprucing things up in our foyer, building a compost bin, and now, updating our guest room!  Eventually I’ll post more about progress on the spa bench for the bathroom, but for today, you get pretty pictures of our (very much still in-progress) guest room!

Here’s what it looks like today:

Now, for the story…

When we bought our house, this room was occupied by a young boy and was decked out with a sports theme, complete with baseball fan, football cross bars, and a wallpaper border.  And let’s not forget the forest green ceiling, shall we?

Since we A) don’t have an 8 year old boy with a sports obsession, and B) don’t enjoy cave-like rooms, we knew this would be a HUGE overhaul.  Soon after we closed, we got to work on removing the wallpaper border, and priming the room for some fresh paint.

I seriously have nightmares when I remember priming and painting this room!  With that dark green paint, it took two coats of primer to get good coverage on the walls and ceiling before we could paint.

Already looking brighter, right?  We chose a light blue color for the wall, hoping to coordinate a bit with some furniture I’ve had since I was a teenager, which formerly belonged to my mother as a child.

A little brighter than we expected, but it was still a HUGE improvement from what we started with.  \

We added furniture into the room, and the wonderful quilt my mom made for me, and for a while, the room looked like this…

Again, let me remind you where we started:

So much better, right?  Well, there was obviously still a lot more we could do with this room besides paint and change the fan out for a light from a different room.  I had dreams for drapes, artwork, and hopefully, a bedspread that matches the room a bit better (the quilt will have a new home in a different room).

Fast forward a few months, and I finally was able to snag the last missing piece to complete the furniture set – the headboard!  In the 10+ years I’ve had this furniture, we were never able to get the headboard from my grandparents due to the size of it.  After a quick trip in April to help them move, I was able to bring back the headboard in a U-Haul trailer, and at last, she’s with the rest of the family!

Ignore the awful color in this photo – take a cue from me and never take pictures at night!

We switched out the quilt for something blue, which works a bit better, but still doesn’t quite fit.  Maybe I need to recruit my mom to do something custom once she finishes the half a dozen other quilts she’s making  We also put in another lamp on the left that was a garage sale steal for $1.  Sure, it’s huge and probably would look better in a living room, but it works for now.

The most recent update to the room is something I’m super excited about – drapes!  I found some inexpensive drapes at Ikea, and after some drilling and leveling (thanks DH!) we now have some glorious flowing drapes to add a little bit of softness to the windows.

The print is a bit more modern, but still soft and organic looking, which is just what I was looking for.

I also snagged a white throw pillow on sale at Macys for $10.  The quilt stays for now, along with the gold sheets. Obviously this combo is SO working!  *cough cough*

A couple of other additions to the room include a vintage fan we found at Good Will for $3, a huge stack of art books in need of a home, and a little print that I might hang somewhere in the room.

What do you think of the floor lamp with the orange, blue, and white?  Do you think it’s too much?  I kinda like it, in a very vintage-meets-traditional-meets-modern kind of way.

Over on the dresser, I added a negative botanical print from a photography class I took in high school, a handmade glass hurricane that used to be in my great grandparents summer home on Washington Island that I rescued from my grandparent’s basement , and three Swedish and Danish painted plates and hangings that belonged to DH’s grand parents that I’m going to hang in the room somewhere.  Oh, and a cute little stack of books

I love the changes so far

For wanting to paint our master bedroom?

I mean, the room is freaking HUGE. (this is from when we went house hunting)

And it has the same color of paint EVERYWHERE, including the vaulted ceilings.

It’s not a bad color – a nice soft sage green.  But, it’s kinda boring and ho-hum to me.  I’d kind of like something a little bit closer to turquoise, a la my favorite two inspiration pictures:

But, it would take FOREVER to paint our room.  And I’m not sure I could convince DH to pay someone since he’d probably be more than fine keeping it the way it is.  I know it’s not a huge change, but I love the look of the slightly blue/green turquoise with the salmon/orange and white, plus all the natural colors.  Feels very soothing and calming.

Maybe some day…

I’ve lost track of what day it is, but all I know is that we have paint on the walls! Woohoo!
Here’s a few (badly white-balanced) pictures of the two bedrooms. The green room is a bit less lime-y, and the blue room is more of a baby blue. Unfortunately, neither of them really looks anything like what I wanted, which is a bummer. But I am way too sick of painting to care right now. We can repaint next summer…I’ve had enough for now!

Without further adieu -

Things I still need to do – take the rest of the painters tape off in the green room (It’s all done in the blue room, but I’m going to wait and show that to you tomorrow!) and do touch ups along the ceiling.

One thing I definitely learned – don’t tape the ceiling. It just doesn’t come out well with latex paint. I scored along the tape while removing it with a sharp blade, and I still had nasty pealing brand new blue paint. UGH! It looks pretty bad in a few places. Next time, I’m just go to go at it with a narrow brush right along the edge, and then paint down far enough so that rolling won’t mess with the ceiling. Saves time (sorta), money, and frustration!

We’ve also had a bunch of work done on the house already – we had a guy come out and install a gas line for our dryer earlier this week, and finish hooking up the W&D over the week. Only to get sidetracked by our apparently busted humidifier…which then caused him to tinker around with a pipe and bust that on accident. So, the plumber came earlier and fixed that up for us. Tuesday we had the electrician out here updating a bunch of outlets for us and fixing some bogus wiring under our sink. Hopefully this will be the last of the “paid for” repairs we do for a while!

However, a solution to our RIDICULOUSLY hot attic must come quickly. We were sweltering last night. It’s a full 20 degrees warmer up there than the rest of the house, and I’m pretty sure the previous owners didn’t update the HVAC for the additional square footage when they finished the space off into the posh master suite we are now sweating living in.  So, either a temporary window AC unit is in our future, or we’re going to evaluate some creative attic ventilation.  We’ll see…

Well, this wasn’t *really* day one, day one was the first day we could call the home ours. I spent the afternoon dusting and mopping, which probably was a waste considering how much of a mess we made on Saturday!

We’ve made probably 4 trips to the hardware store (whoops, we need a different scraper!) and I’ll probably make another one today to stock up on painters tape.

Saturdays adventure was wallpaper removal. Fun times, let me tell you. A word of advice – rent the steamer. Why we let the guy convince us not to is beyond me, but with the complete failure of the first half of our day, I was kicking myself for not heeding the advice of many Nesties before me. *sigh*

We went the stripper solution route, and it was TEDIOUS work. Here’s how the room looked at the beginning.

Cute little boys room with very bright walls and wallpaper border.  Plus the fan.  That is definitely going in the garage sale pile.

Here’s a look at our first stab at taking down some of the paper.

It’s not very pretty.  We were definitely doing it wrong.

A little further along, with DH sweeping up some of the little wall paper scraps all over the floor.  If we had actually followed the directions, we probably wouldn’t have made such a mess!

Here’s what it looked like with all of the paper down, and the tape is up for priming.

We also removed a wallpaper border in the other kids room.  This one DH did all on his own while I went and visited a friend (HI MEREDITH!) – the border was up pretty high, so he spent a lot of time on the ladder.  Here’s a look at the room after he finished taking down the border, with a little preview of what we accomplished on Day #2!

Woohoo, progress!

Congrats to Scott and Colleen – another friend engaged! I’m so excited for them. If they get married in December, that would make for…..let’s see…..7 possible wedding invites this year, with the possibility of 5 attended. Good ratio. Crazy amount of weddings, but they’re fun.

This past weekend I was up in Maine for Jonathan and Anna’s wedding, I was their photographer! It was pretty crazy, but I really enjoyed it. It was a very good learning experience, taught me a lot about how to do a wedding, what’s required of you, and the fact that its something I might actually be decent at. Also, learned that if I seriously wanted to get into it, I’d need to upgrade a lot of my photo stuff, which I can’t really afford to do. Maybe if other people ask me to shoot their weddings and I get paid, I could work towards that – who knows…..

Another exciting artsy thing happened – I painted my first commissioned painting! Sold it to a friend of mine who had something particular in mind for a gift. I can’t believe it, I sold a painting. Craziness. I guess this is what real artists do, don’t really feel like I fit into that category…