Guest Room/Office Update - A Little Window Dressing

For those of you who have been tuning in for awhile, you may remember the ongoing project that is my home office/guest room.

I started off as a sport's den for the Mister, then we had Little Man and things got all flip-flopped around upstairs.  Now, the smallest of our 5 bedrooms is where we pay the bills and house our guests.

The room was originally red (remember the sport's den?).  Then, I thought I was going for a mustardy yellow...and wound up with this:

YIKES!  I actually bought this paint about 5 years ago when the guest room was another room and never got around to painting.  This just goes to show that paint does have an expiration date.  It took 3-4 coats over a primer to get the paint on evenly and the color was, well, you can see.  Hor-rendous.

Time for a revamp.  Since this is a small room, I wanted white walls.  All of the walls are painted Behr Polar Bear up until the top of the window frame.  The plan is to create a photo ledge around the perimeter of the room and paint the top portion a soft gray.  Baby steps.

Here's what the checklist looks like so far:

paint the walls up to the window frame

paint the top of the walls

bedding

build the photo ledge

create a headboard

make curtains

rearrange the room

organize the closet

artwork (this one is half finished)

recover ottoman/chair

lamps

I promise to update you on the crossed items I haven't blogged about.  All will be revealed soon! :)

We're getting there!  Of course, the really hard stuff is left...

Today I'm sharing the DIY curtains I made.  Now, if I could put these together, I know you can.  I do have a circa 1978 sewing machine my grandma gave me.  However, I've never turned it on, nor do I know how.  This project was done with the awesomeness of iron on fusing.

Remember the clearance shower curtains I recovered my ottoman and desk chair with? 

Well, they made another appearance.

I split a shower curtain down the middle and used one half for each side of the window.  Since they weren't long enough, and I like a little puddle in my drapes, I used a drop cloth from Home Depot and iron fused the pieces together.  I thought a little stripe of the shower curtain patter would be cute, so I just measured, cut and ironed those together too.  It took my one preschool day (about 2 hours) to finish.

After I hung them back up, they still needed a little something, so I cut a piece of burlap from my giant roll and hung it over the curtain rod.  To give it some swag, I just tucked it up with my fingers and put a safety pin under the fold on each side.  This took about 3 minutes.

Really hard to photograph windows guys!  I love a sunny day, but geez!  These pics are crazy!

 I hope you can get a good enough feel for how it all turned out.  I'm pretty happy with the result and so glad to have checked that item off my list.

The room is starting to take shape.  I really have taken my time on this one and I'm glad.  I usually want to just get things finished, but I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to use what I have and most of all, how we want to use the space.

Are you ready to go fashion some curtains out of nothing?!