Guest Bedroom Makeover – ORC Fall 2022 Week 1

Big changes are afoot with this guest bedroom makeover to transform it from drab and sleepy to dark and stunning!

This is week 1 of the Fall 2022 One Room Challenge. For those unfamiliar, ORC is a biannual challenge for interior designers, decorators and stylists to finish one room in their house in 8 weeks. The challenge is also open to guest participants like us. Every week we’ll be posting an update on our blog and on Instagram as we take you along with us as we transform a mundane guest bedroom into something stunning.

To put it simply, I’ve been press-ganged into completing an entire room makeover from stem to stern during the height of our busiest season.

What could possibly go wrong?

While I’m at it, perhaps madam would like breakfast in bed and tea on the lanai? I’ll build the lanai, of course. I’m swimming in free time!

Kidding aside. We’ve got a big job, a small budget, and a hard deadline. Let’s get to it!

The Guest Bedroom Makeover

For our first ORC, we’ve elected to tackle one of our guest bedrooms. At this point, both of our guest bedrooms are storage areas, but this one takes the cake. Let’s have a look at the before pics to give you an idea of what we have to work with and where we intend to take it.

Storage room with a view

This is one fancy storage room with a nice view of the driveway! Here’s the look when entering the room.

There’s a little something for every season in this room, plus a collection of picture frames dating back to the Renaissance. I was hoping to unearth a Botticelli or perhaps a Caravaggio nestled in one of those ancient frames, but the most noteworthy I’ve found so far is a bowl of apples next to a rose. Ah well, here’s to hoping…

Well, priceless paintings or not, everything you see in this room shall be shipped off to storage, and while I’m at it, I may as well tear out the carpet. I’ve done it in every other room I’ve worked on, and this one is no different!

Is it just me, or does this closet door look a little lonely and abandoned?

Don’t worry. We’ve got plans to make this sad sack of a door into the belle of the ball. Well, if doors had balls, that is. o_0

I’m gonna get that view back. Just you wait and see!

Walls

For those familiar with our makeovers, you know in our last house we used a lot of white, especially on the walls. We love the cleanliness of white, but we’re getting a little white-weary. Yeah, yeah, I know everyone is painting stuff dark these days, so why shouldn’t we?

Since moving to Florida, we’ve started to break some of our old design routines. Some of you have already seen this in our young adult bedroom makeover. With this makeover, we’re going darker still. The accent wall will be dark, and the other walls will depart from our standard white, though we’ll lighten things up a bit compared to the accent wall. Right now, Sherwin-Williams Peppercorn is our front-runner for the accent wall. The rest of the walls are TBD, but I can assure you they will be super fabulous with a touch of rad.

We’re also planning to add a wood slat feature to the accent wall – something like the one below.

After our son’s bedroom makeover, I consider myself a salty old pro at wood slat accent walls, but that could just be my talking out of the lily-white region of my body.

Ceiling

We’re debating keeping it light color or dark color to match it with the accent wall. We’ll see which idea wins in the end.

Like the accent wall, the ceiling will have its own wood slat accent. It won’t be all over the ceiling though, just a small portion of it. No word yet on how my creaking, half-century-old, martini-soaked bones are going to work on a ceiling like that. I’m going to have to study how Michelangelo painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for inspiration.

Floor

As with all the carpet in this house, it’s gotta go! I’ll be ripping it out as soon as I finish painting, and I’ll lay some LVP flooring in its place. That alone is going to make a huge difference! Don’t get me wrong – I love carpet! There’s nothing toes and soles like better than a plush carpet floor. The problem is that “wall-to-wall carpet” and “interior design” seem to be two mutually exclusive concepts that would never share the same sentence, let alone room!

There will be room for an area rug though. Area rugs are the cool kids on the block compared to the Poindexter whole-floor carpets, and we’re already on the hunt for one that’ll tie all the elements of this makeover together.

Bed

Simple, functional and easy on the eyes – that’s our motto! Make it easy on the wallet, and you’ve hooked us like a Gulf grouper in spawning season! It will go about where the storage shelves are in the picture below. If there’s one thing my babes and I will never have enough of, it’s storage!

Closet door

I’m going to make inexpensive modifications to the existing door to make it look like it’s from a high-end boutique.

Of course, it might help if you could see the door. Well, I did take the liberty of moving those storage shelves to…storage. Novel thought, eh?

Just scroll up a ways to see the door again if you really need to, but I’m warning you, it’s so boring you may fall asleep and miss the rest of this illuminating post!

So I think I’m going to make that door into slatted showpiece. We’ll see. You’ll see. I’ll see, to be honest, because at this point it’s all just a bunch or wavy arm movements and jumbled words from my babes.

Fret not, madam – I’ll eventually translate my wife’s squawkings into an actionable plan!

Bathroom door

I will remove the existing door and make a sliding door to replace it.

Huh, I just re-read the previous sentence with an Arnold Schwarzenegger accent and it sounded kinda badass.

Our current plan is an antiqued mirror door. But my babes is nothing if not unpredictable, so this plan is certainly open to change or modification.

Entry

I’m going to install a wood slat feature in that small entry alcove. We’re on the hunt for inspiration, and we should settle on something soon.

And here you thought we’d have this whole room makeover plan perfectly laid out in this first post! Ha!

Truth be told, we have most, but as with all things DIY, there’s always an element of improvisation and last-minute substitutions.

At least, that’s how it is with us.

Windows

Eyes are the windows to the soul, and windows are the, er…windows to the ummm….ah never mind.

Since these windows have a scenic view of our cracked concrete driveway, we’re thinking it might be a good idea to go with blinds and drapes. We’re partial to the bamboo blinds we put in Baris’s room, and we’re thinking of backing them up with light-filtering drapes. Our driveway is nice enough, I suppose, but I don’t think our guests will necessarily want to gaze out upon it while buckling their brassiers or donning their tighty-whiteys, and I’m pretty sure anyone caught unawares in the driveway wouldn’t want to glance into the bedroom while such activities are taking place.

Furniture

We have a couple of bedside tables we picked up at a tag sale that would be perfect for this room after I give them both makeovers. I dream of the day we find furniture at a tag sale that I can unload from my truck and put directly into use. Until then, it’s Makeover City, sweetheart. While I’m at it, I may also make a small writing desk so my dad can work when my parents visit.

Fixtures

I will be replacing that fan with…anything but that fan.

Seriously though, if you own a company that makes things that go in homes, and you decide to make a line of products called “builder grade,” it is my sincere wish that you receive no Valentines Day cards this year.

It is also my sincere pledge to dismantle your products with extreme prejudice whenever I encounter one in our home.

Well, that about sums up our plan for our guest bedroom makeover. You can expect some changes along the way, because the only constant in our lives is change!

But change is fertilizer for the soul, and as we embark on our very first One Room Challenge, we look forward to the many wonderful changes we’ll be bringing to this humble guest bedroom.

Click the ORC logo below to check out the other participants!

HERE IS OUR ORC PROGRESS

Week 1  ||  Week 4  ||  Week 5  ||  Week 8