One Room Challenge: Guest Room Makeover

Since moving into our house three months ago, I created a fun craft room for my girls and have been making progress on our kitchen, dining room, and living room. But every single room in the house needs work, especially the one that I haven't even touched - the guest room. Up until now, the guest room has been pretty low priority but we have a lot of friends and family coming to visit in the next few months so I've got to kick things into high gear.

Here's where Linda from Calling it Home comes in. She's hosting her third "One Room Challenge" where design bloggers transform a room, start to finish, over six weeks. Perfect timing. I'm linking up and playing along as motivation to transform our grim guest room into a beautiful guest retreat. 
Of course every good "after" has to come with a not-so-hot "before". Ready for some scary pics? Let's go:

As you walk into the guest room, you are greeted by a huge pile of stuff that we've unpacked from the move but haven't yet found a home for. There's no closet in the room so our guests get to use a metal rolling clothes rack to hang their clothes. Lovely.

On the other side of the room you can see my oh so lovely floral balloon window treatments:

I'm in need of new guest bedding too - the bedding that I had in our old house was a hand-me-down from my mom but my parents recently bought a new house and now my mom has a use for it again. I was ready to change things up anyway so I gave the bedding back to her and am temporarily using our old master bedroom duvet. 

There is a chest of drawers in the guest bedroom that I got on clearance quite a while ago - the shape of it is really cool but the color? Not so much. 

Since our guest room has no closet, an armoire is a must. Right before we moved, I spotted this guy in the open garage of a friend and neighbor - it was on it's way to Goodwill but instead it made it's way to me. It's a TV armoire but the plan is to add a rod and remove the shelf so it can be used for hanging clothes.

Now that you've seen the heinousness of what I'm dealing with, let's make a plan.

1. I'm going neutral. I love the calm, serene beauty of neutral bedrooms:

{Driven by Décor}

I plan to bring in lots of patterns and textures in my fabrics - these are a few I've been eyeing at Calico:


2. Do some furniture painting and/or refinishing - the armoire and the chest both need a makeover. Some new knobs/handles are also part of the plan. These furniture pieces are ugly now but they've both got some serious potential.

3. Add some life to those melba toast walls. Maybe a medium-dark gray?

{Name 5 Things}

4. Add some seating by either making over my Goodwill chair or stealing some furniture from another room in the house (it's always musical chairs around this joint).

5. Add a gallery wall over the chest. Something like this:

{Pottery Barn}

6. Replace the ugly balloon valances with simple Roman shades:

{Pleats & Puddles}

7. Replace the ugly ivory light switches/plates and door hardware:

 I'm thinking venetian bronze:

8. The nightstands? I'd like something bigger than these little ones with room for a clock, books, etc. but that may be something I do at a later date - we'll see...

I'm thinking that's enough to keep me busy for the next six weeks. What do you think of the plan?