Re-dcorating the Guest Room.

After spending some time in November and December vacationing I realized the importance of having a very comfortable and beautiful guest room. This is what the guest room looks like now:

Our guest room is pretty tiny but it faces South and is always filled with light. To make it more guest friendly I need to make it feel more fabulous than it is now. I think we need to add some shelving, maybe in the alcove (next to the window and not seen in this picture) and over the bed. I would like to fill the shelves with some books about Philly and other great reads. We have no shortage of books in the house and this would give me more storage for the books and also provide our guests with some good reading material. I love the shelves in the images below and would like to use these images as inspiration to build our own shelves:

Via Design Sponge

(source unknown)

Since the room is pretty small I want to paint it a dark color, maybe a greenish grey and attempt to obtain a cocoon effect. I think that smaller bedrooms look much better in a darker color. I don't think that a small room ever looks bigger with a light color. Similarly, I think a small room looks better with larger pieces of furniture, even if they take up a lot of space, instead of tiny furniture scattered around.

I think that I will also paint the lamp base in black and get a smaller end table. Also, the batik peacock art will be moving to the basement temporarily. I want one large painting over the bed.

I hope that this will be a short and inexpensive project!

Guest Bedroom.

What is now the guest bedroom was at one time going to be my closet.  The room is tiny and I've had a hard time figuring out how to make the space more inviting.

Finally, after being stuck inside because of the snow storm and in desperate need for something to do, Scott and I decided to move the bed around in the guest room and this is what it looks like now:


The bed faces the window and the view is great (as great as it gets for a house in our neighborhood). 

The room faces South so the room is generally filled with great light.  What a huge difference a small thing like moving the bed around does for a room.  The room looks so much more inviting and restful. I love these bamboo blinds.  They filter the light beautifully.

I bought the blue and white batik wall hanging in Sri Lanka in 1990.  It has been tacked to the walls of all the apartments that I have lived in since 1992.  The other batik wall hanging is also from Sri Lanka and we bought that in 1999.  I am glad that my peacocks have finally found a permanent home.

We still have to paint this room but that will have to wait until we've removed the wallpaper on the second floor landing, fixed the plaster on that wall and put on new wallpaper.