So when I was looking to completely redo my guest room, I definitely did not have a lot of money to spend, but the room was so dark & blah that I had to make some updates. I had old furniture from my great aunt's house. I liked it, but it was pretty dark & my grandmother had just passed away & we really wanted to keep her French Provincial furniture in the family. Since we were updating the furniture, I decided let's just update the entire room. Best thing about switching out the furniture...I didn't pay for the new furniture & I actually sold the dark furniture at a yard sale & made like $150 because people obviously have much bigger rooms than me that dark furniture works in. : )
Besides the furniture, the first thing to go was the wall color. I hope the person who lived in this house before us never reads this because the wall color was absolutely horrendous. I'm talking like an awful peach/sherbert color. It was not cute. Luckily, they had painted the kitchen a Tiffany blue (which I actually hated in the kitchen & repainted too) & had some leftover. So the walls went from peach/sherbert to more of a Tiffany blue. And I ditched the bamboo blinds for that room.
The lighter furniture & different colored walls really made all of the difference. SO much better. The room is small, so the layout had to stay the same. Something else I updated was the wall above the bed. We had some older baseball pictures in dark frames, but I really wanted to kick out anything that was too dark from this room. I decided I wanted to do a wall collage. Along with my grandmother's furniture, I also had other things that meant something to me that I had wanted to keep when she passed away. She was so girly. She loved jewelry & had this gold jewelry box that I used in the room. I had some other candle holders that were jewel tones that I used in there as well. She also had a lot of things from Germany, where she was from.
There are some German books & another small jewelry box from Germany. My grandfather had passed away about 10 years before & I wanted to make sure things of his were in our home as well. He was an avid pipe smoker & we have his pipe carousal downstairs. It was always one of my favorite things. He also collected matchbooks, whether it be some place in town or somewhere that they visited. He even wrote off to places to get them to send him some matchbooks. I have those matchbooks in a glass candle holder in this room as well. He never really used the matches, so if this room ever catches fire, I am so screwed. : )
Anyway, the wall collage. Of course I went to Hobby Lobby to see what they had on sale. The bottom circle wooden piece was on clearance for about $5 there. I just liked the look of it. The square in the top right-hand corner was another piece on clearance for a few bucks that I liked. I wasn't looking for anything too particular, just the basic brown, golds or blue tones & I wanted it to be cheap. Both of these fit the bill.
The other three frames on the top left, middle & bottom right were frames that my mother had taken down at her house & removed the pictures from. She was getting ready to toss them when I snagged them & decided to use them. The one in the bottom right is actually an old family photo of us when I was in like middle school. It isn't a particularly flattering picture but it is so 1990's that I had to keep it. My husband loves it & always chuckles when he sees it. The other two frames, I needed to fill. The one in the top left was the simplest.
I found a crocheted place mat at World Market for a couple of dollars & used my handy dandy upholstery stapler to staple that sucker to the back of the frame & then I just hung it up. Super simple & I liked the textured look that it created. For the middle picture, I also used an empty frame & a lot of my grandmother's old things from Germany to create a collage. You can read more about that
picture collage on the
Frame of Memories post.
So other than the new blinds we bought, which were under $30 a piece, I really only bought some new shams from TJ Maxx & then the two wall pieces that I bought on clearance at Hobby Lobby & the place mat. So this room was pretty cheap to redo. That's definitely the way I like it. ; ) And I was glad that I was able to reuse some things from my grandparents' house that were sentimental & some things from my parents house. Happy Weekend!
