Guest Bedroom Before & Afters

When we moved into our apartment, we focused first on decorated the living room and kitchen (you know, the places you see when you walk in the door). It took much longer to get the bedrooms just how we wanted them, but I've made a lot of progress lately on both of them!

Let's start with the guest bedroom. When Jeff moved in, it looked like this:

Total blank slate!

My living room in my old apartment was all black, white, and red, so it seemed smart to decorate the guest room with all of my old living room stuff. Jeff was on board pretty quickly because he went to college at South Carolina, where the colors are black and red. Plus, we both really wanted something to balance out all of the brown that was appearing in the rest of the apartment.

So, here are the before & after pictures of our red, black, and white guest bedroom:

Before

This is right after I moved in... we had painted the wall, bought the Ikea bookshelf, and added the Ikea bedding. The bed was on loan from Jeff's parents.

After

And this was a couple days ago - after some more Ikea furniture, a few more decor items, curtains, and a little more Ikea bedding. 

I'm very happy with how it turned out. I love having one room that's just fun and modern. All of the furniture came from Ikea's "Hemnes" collection, including this cute little bedside table (oh and that little clock, also Ikea! Haha). 

When we got married, Jeff still had a lot of college stuff around the apartment. Fraternity composite photos, football posters, marching band paraphernalia. I had already boxed up most of my sorority items and Fish Camp stuff into two "college memories" boxes that live in storage at my parents house, so I was pretty ready to remove Jeff's college stuff as well. My husband, however, was not quite as ready. So I had to pick a few items that could stay and fit in with the apartment decor, and Jeff took the rest to work, where he now has an office that screams SOUTH CAROLINA GAMECOCKS!!

Those two frames on the wall are one of the things we kept - black, white, and red vintage album covers from some old USC marching band records. 

Oh, and that's my bathroom by the way. :)

And here we have the new curtains, also from Ikea (we had a big gift card leftover from the wedding!).

This is the one wall I'm not totally committed to. I'd love to get rid of the ancient TV and hang a big piece of art of some sort on that wall, but Jeff's pretty pro-TV. So for now, it stays. And the filing cabinet over there on the left... we just don't have anywhere else to put it. So although it says "hello guest, welcome to our house, why don't you take a peek at our personal documents?", it stays too.

Here's the source list for mostly everything:

Bed, bedside table, and dresser - Ikea's Hemnes line in black-brown

Duvet - Ikea's Mysa Stra

Duvet Cover - Ikea's Alvine Trad

Euro Pillows - Ikea's Golsa Tulpan

Red Quilted Bedspread & Shams - Ikea's Alina

Gray Blanket - Ikea's Felicia

Bookshelf - Ikea's Expedit in black-brown

Curtains - Ikea's Vilmie Linje

Curtain Rod - Target (Room Essentials)

Clock - Ikea's Dekad

Black Square Wood Carvings - Marshalls HomeGoods

Red bowl - originally purchased for the wedding

White frames above the bed - originally purchased for the wedding

Everything else (lamps, frames, pillows, red/black decor stuff, TV) - stuff we already had

Mattress - also Ikea, but I can't remember which one it was! 

In the end, we did the whole room basically from scratch for just under $1000, not counting the wedding gift card that we used at Ikea, and it only took us about five months. Haha! I'm pretty happy with the results. Wanna come be our guest?

Stay tuned for a post on my method for hanging a frame collage!