next up: back-up guest room

Yes, I realize how ridiculous the title of this post sounds. No, our house is not huge (1800 square feet). But one of the biggest selling features for us was how well those 1800 square feet are used, and how many "spaces" the house has, even with the open-ish floor plan.

Because Mark and I both work from home, we need separate, full-time offices, and as we learned when we worked from our condo in LA, it's a major drag to figure out somewhere else to work whenever we have guests in town. Because we bought this house almost entirely for the purpose of having guests visit, we had to find a way to carve out separate spaces.

Lucky for us, the house has the loft that serves as my office, and the attic that serves as Mark's (shown in this post, with an update on the color we chose coming soon!), leaving the two bedrooms other than ours available for guest accommodations. Sweet. (Oh, and it helps that we don't have kids. That would surely change how we use the spaces.)

We already did a basic refresh of the primary (i.e. larger) guest room, and now it looks something like this:

There's still tons more to do in there -- sew and hang the real curtains in front of the thermal liners you currently see, get some things on the walls, paint the nightstand to the right of the bed black, add a box spring so the bed frame doesn't look so tall, etc. -- but those certainly aren't things that will keep us from having people over (four sets of guests have already stayed in there).

But back to the back-up guest room. Here's how it looks today:

Tiny and dark, with nothing going on. All of the bedrooms in our house are petite (though our bedroom feels less so because it has a vaulted ceiling), and rather than trying to fight it, I'm aiming for an uber-cozy vibe that embraces the smallness.

I would love for it to come out something like this:

Designed by Vanessa De Vargas of Turquoise, photo via

The first thing I love is that wall of curtains. They bring so much softness/coziness to the room, and make an otherwise small, blah wall look like it's got something going on. It also doesn't hurt that the curtains obscure the actual size of what is probably a small window, just like in the room I'm hoping to spruce up.

To match the look of these curtains, we have an Ikea curtain track system ready to hang from the ceiling just as soon as we get the room painted. (Did I sound convincingly casual about that statement? I'm actually terrified to install it, and hope that Mark will be willing to figure it all out... and maybe do all the work too. It looks complicated, but obviously I believe the pain will be worth the pay-off.)

As un-girly as my style usually is, I also love the use of that flowery chandelier in the tiny room. (Bonus: it brings more light into the room than our current, sad fixture provides.) It just so happens that we have a similar chandelier in storage. It came with our condo in LA.

LA dining room when we first toured the place:

I had almost forgotten those popcorn ceilings! Ah, memories. And can you believe this was the home of a single man? Apparently he decided it was easier to sell and move than to hang a new chandelier.

And because I can't bear to show just the before, here's the after:

Another thing I apparently couldn't bear? Getting rid of the painted chandelier. Even though it's so totally counter to our normal decorating style. I must have known, somewhere deep down, that we'd want to use it some day. And that day is today.

As for the nightstands, I have those too. I picked up a pair of these tables at the Long Beach Flea Market a few months back, and though I was initially thinking I'd paint them (probably white, my go-to), I now don't think I can bear to paint that intricate detailing, especially since the tables are almost 90 years old. Emily said once on Secrets from a Stylist that it's okay to paint anything that's less than 50 years old, and anything older should only be restored to its original look, and more and more, I think I agree with her.

It's okay, though. Even though the tables will be in their natural walnut tone, they have quite feminine lines that will work perfectly with the girly chandelier and soft drapery.

As for the headboard, I'm thinking of getting adventurous and DIYing something per this great tutorial.

So there are plenty of steps to get from blah cave to cozy girly comfort, and if we finally get some snow around here, we'll be way too busy skiing on the weekends to take on any of these projects anytime soon. But it's nice to dream, isn't it?

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xoxo,