Guestroom makeover on the cheap

Furniture is expensive. Especially in Alaska.  So when Matt graciously offered to let me "re-do" the guest bedroom in anticipation of guests visiting, we had to get creative.  If you know us at all, we are quite the bargain hunters (and pretty good at it, if I do say so myself).

At one point this room looked like this...

Yikes. Good thing that didn't last very long. 
It typically looked more like this...

It was filled with furniture hand-me-downs, curtains from our previous home's living room and various mis-matched clutter that just didn't have a place in the rest of our new house.  Sound familiar to anyone?

Then I found this beautiful bed at a going out of business closeout sale a couple months back.  It was such a great deal, we couldn't pass it up (though we were mid bathroom remodel and guest bedroom wasn't quite on the radar yet.  But we are bargain hunters, remember?).  To our surprise, we were able to sell our old, particle board bedroom set on Craigslist for over half the price of this brand new, real wood sleigh bed.  That made this purchase a darn good deal and justified it enough for the both of us. 

It was a start to the new room.

Then I had a random day off work and decided I wanted to paint.  After much debate and several trips to Lowe's for color samples, I decided on this rusty orange color accent wall to brighten it up a bit.  Leaving the rest the neutral color for now.

 I had to wait until Matt got home to help me move the bed.

And of course we had those black curtains. It's already so dark up here (at least right now), they were quite depressing.  But again curtains are also expensive and that window is big!  So I ventured out and decided I wanted to make my own via no-sew hem tape.


Complementing my mom's stain glass she made me.

 As you can see the print matches the wall color.  Much better than the black!

The unfortunate thing about buying just a bed was that there were no nightstands.  It kinda made the room look bare.  So I jumped on Craigslist and patiently waited until I found a set of these...

 An older lady was trying to get rid of them and though they looked old school at first, a $10 can of wood stain and about $24 of new hardware, we turned them into these...

I would also like to point out the fancy green lamps that I found on Craiglist as well for a whopping $20 total.

Matt also installed this wonderful fan (more so needed for the light, not the cool breeze since too much heat is not really an issue up here) because before the room - actually none of the rooms - had a central light.  Again, not sure how the original owners survived with it being so dark...not anymore, thankfully!

So all the above with the new bed set that took a long time convincing Matt of (because it has a couple birds on it - while I think is trendy, he thinks is girly), the room is almost to completion.  I'm still working on wall art, but I have to say I'm quite proud of our new makeover on the cheap.  It's almost ready for visitors.