guest room restoration

When we first bought this place, the majority of the house was livable and mostly renovated. Eventually we'd like to completely redo the kitchen and bath, but otherwise it wasn't too bad. Aside from the windows, it's been mostly cosmetic. The guest room on the other hand had the distinction of worst room in the house, except for maybe the basement. Not exactly a good thing for the "guest room". There are multiple things wrong with this room. Of all the floors in the house, this one has ugly knotty pine patches. The walls have a thick ugly texture on them and most of the original wood trim is gone. Luckily the wood sashes are still there as is all the trim in the closet. It shouldn't be too hard to fix this room.

We're starting with the wood trim, specifically the window casing. For a while I've had my suspicion this room was never painted. Across the hall in the master bedroom, I've always found it odd that the rest of the upstairs was painted yet it was still a nicely stained finish. It's been touched up, but it is original. The layout of the rooms is the same too. It has the same bench seat in the closet with some hefty built ins. Pretty nice actually. You may remember the nursery incident where I sucked it up and just painted what had originally been painted. At least here I have a reason to strip the wood.. I needed to know once and for all -- gotta get started stripping the wood around these sashes before I get the new casing put up. It's some stained grade pine I bought locally which I'm always happy to do.

Here's a closeup of the cheesy molding someone put up. This is going to get replaced soon. I'm shooting for october as we'll be expecting guests again round that time.

Check out the goods. This is going to look so awesome. What's interesting is everything was originally stained except for the closet. Note the two tone finish on the inside of the closet door. This is both good and bad. The good being it's far less work. The bad is that it would have looked pretty cool if it were all stained, including the closet. The master closet is stained although I don't know if it was originally that way. I will be putting it back the way it originally was. There are too many other things that I'm focusing attention on (like finishing my windows for the season) to stress about whether a closet should be stained or not.