Before and After: Guest Bedroom/Office

This before and after post is a little bit different than the others I’ve posted. Back in September, hubs and I finally tackled cleaning and organizing our guest room/office/play room/changing room.

It was one of those rooms that we arranged the furniture and just kind of randomly put stuff in the room, way back in May of ’09 when we moved in to this house, and then didn’t really do much with the room after that, except that we kept adding stuff to it.  The room became a catch all for all of the things that didn’t really have a good place in our house. Please tell me you have a room like that in your house?

So we decided it was time to make this room something that was actually usable for our family.  Obviously, this room has a lot of different “jobs”.  It’s our guest room when company visits, it’s our office with our desk, computer, printer, files and books, we wanted it to be our play room where we could store toys instead of the in the living room, and it also keeps our changing table with cloth diaper supplies and most of hubs’ clothes in the closet.  So, it really needed to be organized to be as multifunctional as possible.

I’m a little bit embarrassed to post these pics, but this is real life and this is what our room looked like for a long, long time.

Before:

After:

So, as you can see, the “After” is a great improvement on the “Before”.  We moved around the furniture to open up more space, and did a lot of decluttering and moving things out of the room that weren’t really necessary.

Once we cleaned out the stuff we didn’t need or use, we realized that we actually had space to store the things we did want to keep in the room, like toys.  We re-purposed some storage containers that we had either cleaned out of stuffwe didn’t need, or had other places, like sitting in the basement and from the kids room, to store all of the toys under the bed.

Because we re-purposed and got a little creative, this was definitely a frugally green room makeover. I was so happy that we were able to create a multi-functional room that fulfilled all of the purposes that we needed it too – and all without spending any money and only using materials that we already had around the house.

And not that the room always looks this way – it is a play room after all.  In fact, looking at these “after” pictures is encouraging me to do a little clean up in here. But, since we got rid of the clutter and gave everything a spot, it’s much easier to get the room back into shape fairly quickly.

A few random things…

After a long weekend of the whole family being sick and just trying to recover, I won’t be posting a meal plan this week.  We’re just taking it easy, trying to rest and recover, and make simple, easy meals using what we already have in the pantry – in other words – boring.

I will say that after another trip to my favorite bulk food store last weekend, I’m happy to have lots of staples on hand to cook and make things from scratch when we’re also trying to keep our grocery bill as low as possible this week.

Also, don’t forget to enter the giveaway for Herbal Nurturing: A Family Healing and Learning Guide through Tuesday at 11:59 EST!  And if you’d just like to go ahead and purchase your own copy, the discount code RENEWED25 for 25% off is good through Saturday the 20th.

——————————————————————————————-

I’d love to see more of you! Please consider subscribing to e-mail updates, or in a reader, to be sure you don’t miss a single post.  You can also connect with me on Twitter and Facebook!