As a Christmas gift to my parents this past holiday, Al and I decided to organize and give purpose to two bedrooms in their house. One was once mine and one was my sisters. Since we’ve both moved out, the two rooms have attempted to have purposes, but have both ended up being more of storage rooms with a bed that you can kind of see and a pathway to the computer desk. They were traveling the weekend before Christmas so it was the perfect time to get the rooms re-done right before the holidays.
We had decided that since we only had two days to complete the project we wouldn’t paint the walls, we had to just work with what was already there. Here are the before pictures.
Hayley’s room before:
My room before:
SO, we had some work to do and truthfully, most of the work was just finding a place for everything. Hayley’s room was still decorated from when she was living there and half of her belongings were still there too. We went through and categorized her things as toss, donate and sell (with her permission, of course). Once we did that her room was a lot easier to work with. We cleared everything out and had a clean slate. We turned her room into a true guest bedroom (not just a room with a bed!).
This was the outcome:
A neat, orderly place for guests to stay. There are also a few storage cubes in the closet, as well as board game and clothing storage.
As for my room, the biggest problem was that there were crafting and scrapbooking supplies everywhere. They just needed a home that was easily accessible. Well, there were other problems too but we got them all figured out! This room needed to serve a bunch of purposes: office area, craft storage, golf storage, workout room and sitting room (Dad sometimes likes to watch TV in here when he’s not in a Dancing with the Stars kinda mood). Here’s how we made it happen:
I’d say we did a halfway decent job of allowing this room to have numerous purposes. In the closet (which I forgot to take a photo of and am very annoyed at myself) lives the craft storage and golf storage. It’s very organized and easy to access. You can also see the treadmill in the corner of the first photo. It fits well in the room and isn’t smack in the middle.
Here are the cost breakdowns of each room:
Guest bedroom:
Day bed frame and trundle (we already had the mattresses): $100 (Craigslist)
Pillow cases and 2 toss pillows: $13.99 (outlet store)
Closet curtain: $4.99 (thrift store)
Wall hangings: $9.99 (some from thrift store, some from craft store)
Guest towels: $12.99 (Kohl’s)
Everything else: FREE. It was either already in the room or in my parents’ house somewhere.
Total: $141.96
Office/workout/sitting room:
Closet curtains: $7.98 (thrift store)
Calendar: $6.00 (office store)
Coat rack: $9.99 (Christmas Tree Shop)
Everything else: FREE
Total: $23.97
For a grand total of $165.93. So we we’re able to convert both rooms for under $200 which was my original goal. Al and I were totally pleased with the outcomes and so were my Mom and Dad. There were some things we would have done differently, if we had more time or money, but for what we were working with we love it.
Do you have any tips/advice? Any things you would have done differently if you were us? Definitely share, we’re always looking for new ideas!
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