Guest Bedroom Summer Makeover Reveal

How we transformed our boring gray spare bedroom into a luxurious cozy guest room just in time for summer overnight guests.

We’ve been renovating our house room by room for the last two years, and the spare bedroom was last on the list for upstairs. So every time we worked on a room, all the leftover stuff ended up getting pushed into the spare room as a holding place. It quickly became a “junk room.”

A couple of weeks ago I shared the design plans I got from Havenly, an e-design service, and over the last week I’ve been working on bringing that plan to life. Today I’m so excited to show you the huge transformation! Here’s how we turned our boring gray spare bedroom into the guest bedroom our friends and family will never want to leave.

Here’s how the room looked before the makeover. Boring, blah, messy, cluttered, all the words I don’t want to describe a guest space. Our old bed, the old rug from our last house, a dresser with missing legs and a cat-chewed corner, and a bunch of random stuff that doesn’t belong here are piled up in every corner. We decided on keeping the bed and nightstands, but everything else was going out.

Guest Bedroom Makeover Reveal

Um, excuse me? Is this the same room? If I hadn’t done this makeover myself, I might not believe me. It looks and feels like a whole new space. For starters, we swapped the bed location to the back wall.

We loved the original placement because it faced the windows, but after we tried the other wall we realized how much more space it allowed for. The room feels so much bigger this way.

The Wallpaper Mural

The biggest impact in this room is definitely the wallpaper mural on the bed wall. I really wanted floral wallpaper to make a statement, but I didn’t want to overwhelm the room so I decided on just one wall.

I chose this large-scale pattern from Photowall and my husband and I installed it in one afternoon. It was super easy to put up, and you can see it from the dining room when the door is open so it brings your eye to the back of the house.

The colors of the mural actually matched perfectly with our existing nightstands. We ended up not even buying the suggested furniture from Havenly since the ones we had worked so well. Plus it pulls the very neutral bedding together with the mural. (Nightstands are an old Target find and are no longer available.)

The walls were painted Alabaster above the chair rail and Perfect Greige below the chair rail (both by Sherwin Williams), and we also painted the door, closet doors, and window trim Perfect Greige. I used this paint for the mirror I snagged at an antique store.

The Bedding

Since the wallpaper had a lot going on, I wanted to make sure I kept the bedding really neutral. With the help of my Havenly designer, we found some really great textures to pile onto the bed to keep the shades of beige and cream from looking flat. (PS: You can save 25% off your own Havenly design package with code LELA25)

There are four bed blankets, various sleeping pillows, and an array of throw pillows to give guests the ultimate cozy factor. I’ll link all the bedding sources in the Shop My Guest Bedroom page since there are so many different items.

Adding Storage

I wanted to make sure the room was very minimal and not cluttered, so I decided against adding a dresser. There’s already a large closet in the room, so it didn’t seem necessary. I did add one floating shelf and some pegs to the blank side wall.

That shelf just holds a couple of room sprays and a bud vase, so guests will have room to sit their small belongings there if needed. There’s an outlet below, so it’s a great place to charge their phone, too.

The pegs can hold their jackets or towels, and one peg has a large basket filled with magazines they can flip through at night or in the afternoons during downtime.

Currently the nightstands are empty, but I plan on filling them with fun things for guests to find later next week. I ran a poll on my Instagram Stories to find out what people like to have a guest room when they’re staying at someone else’s home, so I’ll be using those answers to stock the room even more.

Shop My Guest Bedroom

Looking for shopping sources? I compiled every single link for every item I bought in this page so you can shop for anything you see in these photos easily. Head over to the Shop My Guest Bedroom page here, and be sure to follow me on LTK if you’re an app user. I’ll have everything linked there, too.