While We Were In

I didn't do a "While You Were Out" (I have no idea if that show is even still on) make-over to our guest area in the basement, but I did redo it last weekend.

Jason and I have had a handful of renters live in our basement for a good portion of our married life (coming up on five years!). While our house is pretty small, it has three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs and a bedroom and a bathroom downstairs, so it works well for renting out the basement. We have known almost all of our renters very well so that has made it a smooth process.

But, we are done with renters (at least for a good while). While we could technically still have arenter even with four kids living in our house in the near future (!), we are not going to. Our three kids from Africa will have enough new things to adjust to (us being the biggest ones) that we don't want them to have to figure out who the "extra person in the basement" is.

A note to all of our former renters: Sorry for having to endure the nasty burnt orange paint color in the bathroom while you lived with us!

I have hated the color ever since I put it on the walls nearly six years ago (the picture below doesn't do justice to how bad it was). I was trying to go for more of a corally-red color that the Wallaces' have in their bathroom but I ended up way off. I had a very limited budget back then (I was single) and in the past six years I have rarely spent time in the bathroom. So, it remained burnt orange for a long time.But, the orange is gone! Replaced by a very calming grey (surpise, surprise!). It is the same grey (Vessel Grey from Lowes) that I used in Abram's room.

Yikes! Look at all that orange.

Much better!The shower curtain is from Walmart. I was able to use the purple rugs and towels from the previous "burnt orange and purple" theme.

Here is our guest room sometime before or in between renters.
And now. I haven't decorated much in here yet, but I still like it a lot better. It is painted High Speed Steel (Lowes), the same color as our kitchen. I bought this bedspread at a garage sale probably eight years ago. I have tried to sell it at about four garage sales of my own! I am absolutely not a pack-rat, but when I really like something and think there is a possibility of using it down the road, I hang onto it. I'm sure glad I did that with this light teal bedspread!

I don't have a good picture of the closet in this room, but you can barely see the closet on the right side of the picture below. It had two bi-fold doors that were hard to open with the carpet.

So long hard-to-open bi-fold doors! There are fun, dark grey, shimmery curtains now in their place. I love them! I found these curtains on clearance at Target for $10 each. I wasn't sure what I was going to paint the guest room at the time, but I knew I loved the curtains. I thought I would use them on the window in the room. But, I love using them with the closet.

I wasn't planning to paint the closet, but when Jason saw the three different colors of off-white in the closet, he encouraged me to paint it (and he helped me paint it). I'm glad we did.I had decided to make the closet of the guest room my project area. My project area (for lack of a better term) was formerly in our office and I was planning to keep it in that room (the baby room) when we were going to adopt a baby. Now that that room will have two African girls in it, my project area had to go. I don't scrap-book or make cards or crafts, but for some reason I really need a place where I can store wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, gifts I've found super cheap, extra picture frames, etc.

Here it is (I should have zoomed in a little).

The bulletin board in the middle is where I keep the pictures/stickers/necklaces/etc. my neices and nephews give me.

Left side of the closet. I found the two sets of organzing trays/wire baskets at Goodwill and a garage sale. When I find good organizing items super cheap, I get them!

Right side.

The right side has my extra gifts (some are even for Christmas gifts!), extra frames I've found at garage sales, etc., wrapping paper.

I'm such a nerd that I think this little project closet might be my favorite part of my entire house (well, maybe second to my closet-turned-locker). Everything fit so perfectly in it . . . and there is still organizing space to spare.

My last little repurpose project was this shelf below. It had glass doors on it, which were great for the first few years of its life (see last picture).

But, now the doors are gone and this once-cabinet is now a more useful shelf. It is much deeper than a normal book shelf. I love it!

Here it is in its cabinet glory days.In just one weekend I was able to completely change the look of a whole area of my house. So fun! And besides paint, I used almost everything (except towels and two decorations found on clearance) that I already had.

Lastly, in case you haven't figured it out already, we are trying to do everything we need/want to do to our house before our three kids arrive. Tomorrow we are installing a new toilet in our upstairs bathroom. That will definitely not be as fun as redoing the guest room.