Now Taking Reservations: A Guest Room without the Blues...

When I first looked at this house, the previous owners made some, errrr... interesting choices, but probably the most memorable was the gawdawful royal blue paint on the walls in one of the bedrooms. It was so awful, the room actually felt as if it were vibrating. To make matters worse, there were these long, Frankenstein-looking plaster repairs on every wall. The ceiling plaster was cracked and quite loose, as it was in every room of the house. My favorite little touch in this room, however, was the hole drilled through the closet woodwork to allow an extension cord to be plugged in an outlet in the bedroom, and go through the hole in the woodwork and into the closet where it connected to a light bulb thing that allowed for a closet light. Interesting...

Given the horrid condition of the plaster ceilings, I had all the ceilings in the house sheetrocked, so that fixed that little issue. No worries of huge chunks of plaster letting go of their lath beds and crashing to the floor. But what to do with the walls in this room? Like the master bedroom, there was one wall in this room that featured an odd angle, making sheetrock a questionable option, besides the fact that I really didn't want to strip this room down to the studs. My sheetrock guys had one guy in the crew who was great with plaster, so they suggested skim-coating the walls. This would smooth out the poorly executed repairs, and he could keep the skim coat thin enough that it wouldn't affect the relationship between the woodwork and the plaster - another down-side to stripping and sheetrocking a plastered room.

The woodwork all got the same treatment upstairs - baseboards removed, stripped, sanded and urethaned. Doors, windows and their casings sanded and urethaned. I used a satin finish since I really don't care for the high gloss finish that urethane will produce. To me it makes whatever it's applied on look like it's coated with plastic. The semi-gloss and satin urethanes are more subtle to my eye.

I used a soft brown on the walls - Roxbury Caramel by Benjamin Moore - and I found a loop pile rug at Home Decorator's that was a good size for the room, and gave me a wide color palette for accessories. I wanted this room to feel cozy, yet offer a guest enough space to manage suitcases and all the other things you haul with you when you travel.

I already had a bed for this room, although I had to replace the mattress and box spring. The mattress was ancient, so there was no question that it needed replacing. The box spring would have been fine except that there was no way a queen-sized box spring was going to make the turn at the landing to come upstairs. So I bought a split box. Then I had to put a center support under the bed so the split box wouldn't end up sinking in the middle!

The bed itself was a project that my dad and I built many years ago. I was in between semesters in college and he decided for some reason to buy a pantograph for his router. The pantograph is an attachment that allows you to trace an image with the pantograph stylus and the router will cut that image into a piece of wood.

At the time, I was a journalism major, and the New York Times was one of the gold standards of journalism. Somehow, I got the idea to build a bed and engrave the NY Times masthead on the headboard. I hadn't had a headboard and footboard on my bed since I was a little kid, so this seemed like a fun project. We sussed it out on paper, dad decided red oak was the wood of choice, and we bought a copy of the NY Times just before Christmas of that year. I was sleeping in my new bed by New Year's Eve. We built the entire bed, engraved not only the headboard, but the footboard - I used the living arts page and some of the performances I loved the most to finish that out - hand colored and urethaned the entire thing, assembled it, and had bed linens purchased all in about 2-1/2 weeks. If ONLY we worked that fast these days...

After I moved out on my own, I rarely had a bedroom large enough to accommodate this bed, so it ended up at a friend's mother's house in her guest room for the last 10 years or so. I hadn't even seen the bed since we moved it there. I'm so glad to be able to use this bed again, and to be able to fit it into a room so nicely.

Since this bed would be the guest bed, I knew I had some other pieces that could work in that room, depending on how the bed fit in the space. I ended up being able to use a pine armoire to conceal a TV and DVD player, and I had a CD cabinet that holds movies, CDs and knick knacks.

When I ordered the mirrored cabinets for the living room (blog to come...), one of the cabinets met with an unfortunate forklift accident. They sent me a replacement, but didn't ask for the damaged piece in return, so my dad fixed it good as new and I used that as a nightstand for the very tall NY Times bed.

I have a bit of an obsession (!!) with the Chrysler Building specifically, and with New York City images and architecture in general, so I have somehow collected quite a few photos of that subject matter. It seemed fitting to hang these photos in the guest room. The same friend who took the photo of the sax player in Central Park that I used in my master bedroom, also took a gorgeous photo of the Brooklyn Bridge. I had that made into a canvas and added it to my Chrysler building collection in this room.

I have done this entire house on a pretty tight budget, so I couldn't spend a lot of money on queen-sized bed linens, which you can end up taking a second or third mortgage out to buy 4 billion thread count Egyptian cotton foo-foo sheets if you choose. I found a sheet set on sale, probably at Target, and the bedspread was also on sale. The upside to a sale is, of course, the money you don't spend... the down side is that you often have to choose a color you don't care for, or isn't your first choice. The sheets were a no brainer. I loved the gold on gold stripe - very nice.

The coverlet? Well, there weren't many options that would work. I believe there was a brown of some sort, but it was either quite drab, or would have been too much brown in the room - I can't recall which... that was many purchases ago! So this apple green really isn't something I would have chosen, but I didn't mind it. Once I got it on the bed, however, I knew it was the perfect choice. It adds a little brightness to the peaceful, organic feel of the browns and golds, and that is what I wanted above all, was a peaceful room.

The bed tray/writing table is something I had as well that isn't terribly functional, but looks lovely in photographs!

I wanted to keep the window treatments throughout the house as simple as possible (with the exception of the living room and dining room windows). This is another place where you can spend a small fortune just to keep people from peering into your house. Although I'm all about privacy, I had spent too much time and effort on the woodwork to just cover it up, so I opted for Roman shades. I was lucky on two counts. First, the window sizes allowed me to purchase 'off the rack' shades. Second, I was ready to buy when JC Penney was having one of their huge 'white' sales. I was able to get all the upstairs windows covered for under $300.00. Yes! (Which is a wondrous thing, seeing as I was NOT able to translate my cheapskate shopping skills to the downstairs window treatments.)

And that's all the news that's fit to print until the next room...