Truth be told, I get serious stage fright when it comes to talking about plans for a room before we’ve even started on it. Either I’m worried the “vision” isn’t thought out enough yet to declare it to the internet or I’m just plain scared to wear my “decorating heart” on my sleeve. That being the case, I just never do it. But today, in an effort to start talking about more of the “process” of what we do and why we do it, I’m breaking out of my comfort zone and just going to delve right in. Here goes nothing, haha…

As we mentioned in this post, tackling the guest room is on the to do list for the first part of this year. We have a vacation coming up in a few weeks, but when we get back, it’s game on in the guest room. Our first plan of action… a feature wall. Back in the day, I wrote a post about how I was loving planked walls (read that post here).

After showing Greg a bunch of photos online, he finally warmed up to the idea. Thank you, Pinterest! At first, we were thinking about doing a planked wall in the living room on the wall the TV is on. That wall being so big, we’re now thinking something like white built-ins would really brighten up the room and tie in with the white cabinetry in the kitchen. All of that is for another time and another post. In light of that, we thought a planked wall might make a bigger statement in a smaller room… like the guest room.

I (now we) love the look of planked walls because it’s not too “country” but it still gives you a warm, cozy vibe – which is perfect for a guest room. If you love the planked wall movement, here’s some eye candy for you. Or… if you think we’re absolutely crazy, here’s some examples to try to win you over, haha. Either way, here are some walls we’re using as inspiration…

Houzz / Cape 27 / Better Homes & Gardens

From what we’ve read, the instillation process of a planked wall is pretty easy – not to mention affordable if you decide to use wood from old pallets. We’re pretty anxious to get started and excited about this room finally coming together. Hopefully it will act as a catalyst for the style in the rest of the house.

Now that we have the feature wall planned out, we have the rest of the room. We’re wanting to go with a “modern rustic” vibe – the same look we’re wanting to capture for the rest of the house as it evolves. We’re keeping all of the furniture that’s in the room now, except the chair in the corner and the rug (which we’re planning on Craigslisting as soon as “Operation Guest Room” begins). We’re not sure exactly how the room will end up in the end, but here’s what we’re loving now…

Bed / Art / Chair / Floor Lamp
Pillow / Dresser / Rug / Zinc Letters / Planked Wall

Now for my brain dump… Obviously, the mood board isn’t complete, but it’s colorful, modern and rustic all balled up into one. The current blue wall color will have to change (or else it will end up looking like a circus), but the jury is still out on what color to go with. I think I changed out the rug on the mood board about 10 times. I finally narrowed it down to the one above or this one. The wall art is in the same “color family” as the rug, so even though it doesn’t have yellow in it, they still “go” together… and I’m kind of obsessed with it. The chair has been a favorite for a while, and I think it would really help bring home the “modern” part of rustic modern. It also has a little nod to mid-century which I will always have a special place in my heart for. The pillow in the chair is a little “rustic glam” (in person anyway), which I think might be cool to throw into the mix. Having a big, giant zinc letter somewhere in the room would be neat, and it would bring in something metallic for another texture. Maybe an “R” for “R & R”? The floor lamp is identical to the one we recently scored at Home Goods for $20 and ties in nicely with the bed. Hopefully it will help bring everything together. As for the bed, we think keeping all-white bedding would be fun, but adding some fun Dwell studio throw pillows would be even better. Now, how’s that for a brain dump?

So that’s where are minds are now as far as the guest room goes. Hopefully it makes sense and you all don’t think we’ve just lost our minds, haha. Have any of you tackled a planked wall before? Any tips or tricks to share? 

First image from The Lettered Cottage.

I normally leave the decorating posts up to Ash, but she’s feeling a bit under the weather, so I’m taking over this one. Luckily, she’s already taken a bunch of photos, so you won’t have to deal with my lackluster photography skills ; )

Like a majority of the rest of the house, the guest room is in a constant state of flux. We’re constantly rearranging things, adding small details, and generally working to make the house fit our lifestyle and tastes. Up until last weekend, the guest room was serving as sort of a storage room of sorts of things that needed to be Criagslisted and a few other odds and ends we weren’t quite sure what to do with yet. But, seeing as how the holiday season is now here, we needed to get the room in shape for company. Though, we do have one notable update to share…

…we finally added sconces for either side of the bed. Find the same ones here. We really like the iron finish and the crisp white drum shades. We’ve heard from our guests that they’re very handy at night, as well. Ashley’s grandparents are avid readers, so they particularly enjoy using them when they stay with us.

Every time she walks into the guest room, Ash reminds me we really need to put something over the bed. We originally planned on hanging three frames above the bed (we actually even had the frames hung and waiting for art!) but we’ve recently been discussing something we’d like to do after the holidays that may or may not include a wall treatment for the wall the bed is on. Once that’s done, I think the room will finally start coming together.

Even though the guest room isn’t completely finished, we have a few friends and family who will be staying with us off and on over the next few weeks. In light of that, we decided to spread a little Christmas cheer for our overnight guests.

I promise Ash didn’t stage this when we took this photo. Bentley is just weird like that. Just in time for our guest room spruce-up, our friends at Target sent us a big box of holiday goodies from their Threshold line. By the way, this isn’t a Target Inner Circle gig, this actually came from another department within the Target family. Our Christmas-related Target Inner Circle activity will be coming up in a few weeks – and we’re really excited about it! 

In the big box, which Bentley quickly conquered,  was… 1. a Silver Wreath 2. a gold Cable Knit Throw, 3. a Golden Pinecone Candle (that smells really awesome, by the way), and 4. a Pine Tree Pillow. Using these things from Target, along with some stuff we already had in our Christmas decorations, we were able to come up with a fun, simple Christmas-ized vibe for our guest room. Here’s what we did…

As you can see already, we decided to use pops of red here and there. What’s more “Christmas” than red? We also thought it would contrast nicely with the different shades of blue used throughout the room. Listen to me getting all Vern Yip on you guys! The wreath went on the mirror above the dresser, which tied in with the gray bedding. It also looks great with the black frame of the mirror. (Much to Ashley’s surprise, I’m a huge fan of contrast and balance in colors and tones.)

I had to throw in this photo just because I thought it was cool. Plus, it shows the details of the wreath a little better.

On the right side of the dresser, we put two glass Christmas trees paired with what I like to call “the abstract snow man”. Ash picked it up at Hobby Lobby the other day for about $6 (on sale, down from $12). It’s probably meant to be decorated, but we thought it looked cool just like this. I think it’s a neat modern take on the snowman. The trees are from Tuesday Morning, but Ash bought them about 5 years ago, so it might be difficult to find them now. She actually used them in her college townhouse in Tennessee. They are super fragile, so we’re kind of surprised they’ve survived three states and five moves.

Over on the left side of the dresser is a tray (from Target) with a “twiggy” Christmas tree (from Cracker Barrel), an antique candy dish (from the Cold Harbor Antique Mall), and a rogue Christmas ornament.

We also included an extra house key for guests to use while they’re staying with us. To give it that extra Christmas spirit, Ash put a small red shatterproof ornament on the key ring.

On the bedside table, we replaced the faux white hydrangeas that normally sit there with the gold pinecone candle Target sent us. Even though mixing metals is sometimes considered a no-no, we are all for it. I actually like the way this particular shade of gold looks with the small silver frame. Inside the frame is a photo of Ash when she was a baby blowing bubbles with her Grandma. Since Ashley’s grandparents often stay with us when they come to Richmond, we thought this was a great place for the photo.

We brought this tired chair in here a few month ago when we decided to move it out of the living room, and, while we love the side table (we bought it from a store downtown a while back), we don’t quite know what to do with it just yet. That’s the reason this is our “hodgepodge” room at the moment. We’re planning on replacing the chair and side table with new ones once the room starts coming together more, but this is what we’re working with for now. Oh, and you may have noticed the rug. We actually bought that about a year ago. At the time, it seemed to fit the direction the room was going, but now, we’re not so sure. We’re planning on Craigslisting it down the road unless it miraculously goes with what we’re planning for this room in the future.

We were able to cozy up the corner with the throw blanket and pillow Target sent – both of which will go perfectly with what we have planned for this room! Ash loves the muted shade of yellow and actually used it as inspiration for a graphic design client she’s working with right now. The pillow is awesome, and really helps bring in the white accents from the other side of the room.

On the side table, we have our guest basket along with a little white pot from Ikea with a mistletoe plant and a few more rogue ornaments.

The “plant” is actually a ball of faux mistletoe we picked up from Target last year. By sitting it on top of the pot, it looks like a mini-topiary. I came up with that idea all on my own, and I have been tooting my own horn about it ever since!

Our guest basket is full of nice-to-have things for our overnight guests. This “winter edition” is stocked with three bottles of water, two Christmas coloring books and a box of crayons (fun for kids and the kids at heart), a small box of gourmet sugar cookies, the latest edition of Richmond Magazine, a Sudoku book, a deck of playing cards and a Snowman in a Box (just in case we get lucky with some snow). We also talk about this in our Target Inner Circle article that will be going up soon over on Target’s online magazine, A Bullseye View. We’ll be sure to let you guys know when it’s published!

That about wraps up what we’ve been up to in the guest room. Hopefully our friends and family that will be popping in and out over the next few weeks will feel comfortable in there – even though Ash is a wreck about it not being “finished” yet, haha. If you’ve felt like all of our posts lately are Christmas-related, it’s because they have been. I guess that’s bound to happen when we’re having fun decking our halls and we post just three days a week. But rest assured! We’ll be back Wednesday with a non-Christmas, house-related post!

The folks at Target gifted the four items mentioned above, but, as usual, the content and opinions in this post are our own.

Since beginning our house renovations about a year ago, we’ve been in and out of many, many hardware stores, True Value being one of our favorite stops. Our local True Value has the feel of an old-fashioned hardware store but with all of the modern conveniences. It’s one of those places where “everybody knows everybody”, but they’re happy to get to know new people, too. Pretty much anyone who walks in knows the owner by name, everything is where you’d expect it to be, and the staff enjoys getting to know you and hearing about the projects you’ve planned for the weekend. All in all, True Value makes us happy. So when we got an email from True Value asking if we would like to test drive their new EasyCare Platinum Paint & Primer. We said, “Yes, please!”.

After a little bit of going back and forth, we finally decided on a lovely dark gray color, Forbidden (09D7) in semi-gloss. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Well, what are you going to paint?” Normally, you pick out what you are going to paint then you pick out the paint color. However, in this case, we did things kind of backwards. We knew we wanted painted side tables for the guest room, and we knew what color we wanted. It was just a matter of finding the right side tables. After a few weeks of searching, we finally lucked out and found these two side tables at Home Goods:

They aren’t as large as we had hoped for – though now that we are planning on sconces rather than table lamps on either side of the bed, we don’t need anything very large – but they’re tall compared to everything else we had been finding, and we like that. The price wasn’t too shabby either. They were originally $200 a piece, but were marked down to $72. Score!

Immediately after opening the can, Greg said, “Wow, that’s good stuff!”. Since buying the house, we’ve primed and painted every single inch of the ceilings, walls, and trim of this 2,115 square foot house. That’s a lot of paint! At this point, we feel like we know a good quality paint when we see one and this was definitely one of them.

There are a lot of cool things about True Value’s Easy Care Platinum Paint & Primer including a lifetime warranty, it’s low VOC, and stain/mildew resistant. What really appealed to us even before we opened the can was that it is paint and primer all in one.

Let me go off on a tiny tangent here and say that we’re not a huge fan of two-in-one products most of the time. Take shampoo & conditioner combinations for example… it does the job, but the results aren’t nearly as good as using a good shampoo and a good conditioner, separately. Well, that was not the case with this paint. We were truly amazed by the coverage. Here’s what the table looked like after only one coat…

Yep… ONE. Greg and I think that’s pretty impressive, especially putting a dark color on top of a light color. The coverage was so awesome that we probably could have stopped there but we decided to go ahead and apply a second coat just for good measure.

While we were having fun with our new paint, Bentley was off in the corner, not very happy with the fact that we were painting rather than playing fetch. This is his “Are you done yet?” face:

Back to the project… We let the paint dry for a good 48 hours before we put the side tables in place, and we also changed out the wooden drawer pulls for something a little more sparkly:

A few books, a clock radio, a small silver frame, a candle-holder-turned-vase, and a few hydrangeas later and we’re in business!

We are really pleased with the finish of the EasyCare Platinum Paint & Primer. We can already tell the surface will be very durable and have great washability. The rich gray color is absolutely yummy. I wonder if True Value would be interested in making nail polish… ; )

In the frame is one of my favorite photos from back in the day of me and my Grandma blowing bubbles. We plan on using some more old family photos around the room in the future and we thought this would be a great place to start.

With the help of our friends at True Value, these side tables have undergone a big transformation and we’ve added a new favorite product to our list in the process. It’s amazing how just a few coats of paint can totally transform a piece of furniture.

Now how about that nail polish? ; )