The guest room is ready!

Jim's been hard at work, not just building the chicken coop (which is coming along nicely, thanks for asking, and is nearly done) but also on remodeling the guest room. 

Here's what it looked like in there before we moved in: a long skinny 8x13' room with baby blue paint and spotty-patterned blue and beige berber carpet on the floor. 

The new carpet throughout the walkout basement gave us a good excuse to spruce up the guest room and we decided to give it a new coat of paint.  Yep, a new coat of paint, and one leisurely weekend. That's all it needs. New paint. So the guys took down the built-in shelves on one wall of the room so that when we moved the bed back in, it would fit better. That messed up some of the texture on the wall.  Hm. That, in turn, meant it needed to be sanded down, but that's okay, we're going to paint anyway. The bed looks so much better on the wall where the shelves once were that it will be worth sanding down that wall. But that made the wall too smooth and it's going to need some new texture. Drat. Okay, new texture and then new paint. 

But y'know, with the bed on that wall where the shelves were, now there isn't much room to open the closet doors. How about just taking out the closet doors? They don't work that well anyway. Yep, that's a good idea. So: new paint, new texture, closet doors out.

But that looks stupid over there, with no closet doors. Just a gaping hole with a clothes rod inside it. The room would look ten thousand times bigger if we just took out the closet door framing, wouldn't it? Yes, indeed. Too bad that also means re-sheet rocking the ceiling AND the three closet walls. That brings us to new paint, new texture, closet completely gone, new sheet rock, new ceiling.

Having taken out the old sheet rock inside the exterior wall, it makes more sense now why that room always seemed a little chilly. There's supposed to be insulation in there. In the whole wall, not just part of it. New paint, new texture, new sheet rock, new ceiling, new insulation.

Without the closet there, the former closet light fixture makes no sense where it is, and there needs to be a better place for the closet light switch, and why is that phone jack in that awkward spot on the wall where there's no place to set a phone? Um, where are we? Oh yeah - new paint, new texture, new sheet rock, new ceiling, new insulation and we should replace the light fixture with track lighting, move the light switch AND the electrical outlet since we're re-rocking anyway, and move the phone jack to the other side of the room. 

Shouldn't new paint and new carpet deserve a new quilt for the bed? Naturally. After all, Jim says, it's what Alaskan women DO. They QUILT. Okey dokey. We bought fabric for a new quilt. And once Jim and James got all the sheet rock replaced and textured, now there's the glaring problem of that bent old breaker box panel and phone cable panel. What to do, what to do? The quilt will have a lot of pattern in it so we don't want artwork or the room might look too busy. The panel is too big for readily-available mirrors to cover. And we're used to the midnight sun, but we can't assume our summer guests will have an easy time with it, hence we need to make some blackout curtains to go over the window in there, since I'm already going to be sitting at the sewing machine working on the quilt, right? So let's review the list, shall we? New paint, new texture, new sheet rock, new ceiling, new insulation, replace the light fixture with track lighting, move the light switch and the electrical outlet, move the phone jack to the other side of the room, make a new quilt for the bed, somehow hide the electrical panels and sew up some curtains.

Nooooooo problem.

Fast-forward two months.

The paint is a shade of green that reminds us of the Kenai River water on our first trip to Alaska in 2001, and the blackout curtain is the same color. The carpet is a cushy brown plush. The phone jack is near the bed and the track lighting accentuates the word "Relax" over the baker's racks that are filling the space where a dresser or wardrobe will eventually go. The light also accentuates the first three rows of the quilt that will, someday, be finished and go on the bed. In the meantime, it's a wall hanging that covers the electrical panels.

There now, see what a difference a little fresh paint can make?