Guest room makeover
It’s 2026 and here we are doing a renovation again, this time it’s a mini one and the room is our guest-room!
Dedicated guest rooms can often seem like a luxury thing to have in a home, especially when space is at a premium due to having small children living at home. Even with that in mind, we still want a place for friends and family to stay.
Throughout the past three and a half decades, we’ve had guest room accommodations of one sort or another. It was especially important to us to have a guest room when our mothers would visit for weeks at a time.
We set up our guest room pretty much the same as it was when we lived up north. Our guest room has had the same furniture and overall look for the past 10 plus years - give or take the artwork. Just as in our previous home, this room has had just the one purpose, but we wanted more out of this space.
Our move down south and the entire downsizing process has made us think about things quite differently these days. And after renovating other rooms in this house we’ve decided that it’s time to work our magic on our guest room.
We wanted our guest-room to be more than just a bed in a room where our guests would sleep. We wanted to be able to utilize that space ourselves, and not just as a bedroom. It can be used as a temporary office space, exercise studio or as my impromptu photography studio for my quilting projects, there’s so much more to this space than being a guest room.
This is where my dearest friend was most influential. She and her husband created a sewing room that also doubles as a guest room. To make the most out of her creative space they went with a murphy bed. Her room looks modern, chic and well organized. Her room isn’t just a guest room, it’s her sewing room and her personal home office. Our guest room wouldn’t have evolved to its current state without our dearest friends doing the ground work with their own home.
We’ve been toying with the idea to replace the bed with a murphy bed for the last couple of years. My husband and I would look at them online from time to time, we had specific requirements due to the particular layout of the room. Then in August it happened, my husband found a company that makes exactly what we were looking for. Together we looked at the various designs, colors, sizes along with options and we placed our custom order.
We sold off the furniture and donated boxes of things that we didn’t need. We streamlined our guest room.
Our wait time gave us the perfect opportunity to do the renovation work we’ve been wanting to do. We ripped out and upgraded the baseboards along with the door and window trim. A fresh coat of paint on the walls and the room was now ready for the new bed.
We went with the brand “Breda Beds” out of Idaho. While murphy beds in general come in different sizes and configurations, every company we looked at offered different styles. For us it was about getting the most functionality for this room.
You can find more information about them here www.BredaBeds.com
The components for the bed arrived on one large pallet. Since we’re experienced DIY people, this was no issue to assemble. My husband actually did it on his own, my part was minimal. For safety reasons all pieces need to be anchored to the wall.
For us, the desk option was a must have. As many people work from home these days, so do some of our house guests. The bookshelf and drawer units were perfect for us as they replaced the two larger bookcases we had in the room. The truly interesting feature happens with the top drawers on each side, they have a hidden shelf that slides out so that the drawer can be used as a nightstand, essentially replacing the side tables.
Hands down this has been a fantastic makeover and mini renovation project. We only ran into a handful of weird things the contractor did when building this house, all were dealt with and you wouldn’t even know what those issues were unless we told you.
