Room Tour: Our Budget Guest Bedroom Makeover

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Our guest bedroom renovation is one of my favourites, and the cherry on top was that it really didn’t set us back too much!

Here’s how the room was decorated before its current iteration:

It was OK, but we’d been gifted a new mattress from Valmori for our master bedroom, and since our existing bed was still in good condition and better than the double bed we had on a DIY pallet base in the guest room, we decided to move it there.

The layout and design was for a double bed and it wasn’t going to work for a king mattress, so we decided to make a few changes to the space without spending a whole lot of money.

Here’s how the room looked before we moved in vs what it looks like now:

I’m really pleased with this renovation (which was featured in Apartment Therapy) because it’s such a happy little room that I love walking past! So much of it was upcycled or secondhand, and I reused lots of stuff we already had, so it just shows you can achieve a lot on a small budget.

I’ll walk you through what we did below (or you can watch the renovation in reel form here).

Painted Ceiling

In the previous version of the room, we colour blocked a triangle on the walls to line up with the edges of the pallet bed frame. The triangle was too small for the king mattress, so the paint job didn’t make sense anymore.

The colour was supposed to be more mustard than it was (always buy a sample pot, people) and I was still pretty keen to have a mustard yellow featured in here, so after begging Martin we decided to paint the ceiling mustard yellow and keep the walls white.

We still liked the existing light fixture (a $9 Regolit paper lantern and a $15 mustard cord set from IKEA) so we decided to try match the paint colour to the light fixture.

We ended up with Taubmans Yarrow, which Martin applied to the ceiling with a roller.

This was the second painted ceiling we did in our house, the first being the black ceiling in our master bedroom.

I’ve followed interior designer Natalie Papier on Instagram for a while; white walls with bold ceilings is her signature, and I really wanted to try it myself with a bolder colour like mustard yellow.

We took the Yarrow colour swatch to a specialist spray paint supplier who matched it for us. We used the colour-matched spray can to paint the air-con vent in the ceiling and it was a pretty spot on match!

We did the same thing in our master bedroom and library, so now the air-con vents blend in seamlessly without becoming eye sores.

🎬 WATCH: Mustard Ceiling Before & After

Flooring

Previously, there was dirty beige carpet in here that I had covered up with an oversized rug.

We couldn’t redecorate this room successfully without addressing the floors, but we also didn’t want to spend a huge amount of money.

So we ripped out the old carpet and replaced it with a budget oak-look laminate that we bought from Bunnings. This cost around $400. We finished it off with the same white skirting which is carried throughout the house.

We bought a $150 checkerboard Klassrum rug from IKEA, which conveniently has a yellow stripe along the edge.

I love a checkerboard pattern and I love black and white, so this was an easy, budget-friendly pick that worked well with the ceiling colour.

Upcycled Bed Frame

The king mattress for this room had an ensemble base, but it wasn’t very pretty and we didn’t feel like keeping it.

So we bought a $50 king size bed frame on Marketplace. The ad was superb non-descript; it didn’t show the frame assembled and was just a stack of light-coloured timber pieces.

We took a gamble and went to look at it… the bed was fine and much cheaper than other options on Marketplace! The light timber was nice but my concept for the room was heavy on the white, so Martin painted it with his spray gun.

Artwork

The artwork for this room introduced other colours to this room. It also helped me choose the rug and style the cushion in the room.

This pair of penguins (Perry & Kerry) were kindly gifted to us by Noco Living in Melbourne. They are by far the most asked-about artwork in our home!

They really are the focal point of the room, and I just think a pair of monogamous penguins (yep, penguins are pretty romantic) are kinda perfect for a guest room with a big king size bed.

🎬 WATCH: A pair of penguins reel

Upcycled Bedside Tables

Storage furniture is one of those things that Martin and I can’t really justify buying brand new.

New furniture is expensive, and there is so much available on Marketplace for peanuts. Since Martin is handy and I’m visual, we really enjoy sourcing furniture secondhand and putting our own spin on it.

We bought a pair of bedside tables for $20 off Marketplace. This is what they looked like before:

After spray painting their bodies white, Martin made simple new timber drawers and finished them off with black and white pulls also sourced from Marketplace.

We also sourced a pair of secondhand Freedom lamps off Marketplace for $20. What I loved about these simple lamps were their yellow cords, which add that extra pop of yellow to tie in with the ceiling and decor.

Upcycled Tallboy

Sticking to the upcycling trend, we sourced an old tallboy for $30 off Marketplace. This would be for the nook between the entrance door and closet.

The existing wood wasn’t the prettiest even after we stripped the varnish. Here’s how it looked before:

We didn’t love the vertical dust-collecting rungs at the bottom and I swear to God there is a face in that circular bit (spirits still can’t put me off buying secondhand) so we knocked those out and added a few lengths of timber to form a shelf at the bottom, which might be handy for storing blankets one day.

We painted the rest of it using Taubmans Leafy Lawn, a colour we pulled from the penguin artwork and knot cushion.

Martin still wanted a timber surface though, so he added a new timber top and finished it with a coat of oil.

We bought eight mismatched black and white knobs from a local seller and used six for the tallboy and the other two on the bedsides.

The round mirror was sourced on Marketplace for $20 and I decorated the tallboy with a vase, candle and small thrifted picture frame I already had.

🎬WATCH: Tallboy Upcycle

Bedding

We already had the bedding we used for this room, so we didn’t need to buy anything new.

We had the Chiswick Living textured white bedspread in our master but it was perfect for the colour scheme in this room so we decided it would live here, along with some other white sheets and pillowcases we had.

The chunky mustard blanket was already in this room and it still worked perfectly, breaking up a lot of the white. It was $50 from Spotlight at the time and matched the new ceiling colour much better than the old yellow did.

The knot cushion was a gift from maker Mamy Hews a year earlier. The cushion cover was made using patches of secondhand clothes, which is so on brand for this room.

I’d had this cushion in lots of different rooms, but it worked so much better in here than it did anywhere else. Once I picked the penguin artwork I knew this cushion would make sense in here.

I love how it pops against all the white bedding while repeating the colours in the penguin artwork, and the patchwork shapes work well with the checkerboard rug too.

Windows

After Martin added some white trim to the windows, we put these cheap Big W curtains up prior to this renovation and since they were simple and white they still worked.

In the future, I’d love to get some white venetian blinds and better quality sheer curtains that are almost as wide as the wall, but for now, these are fine.

The embroidered vines in the fabric adds even more texture to the space and they create beautiful shadows when sunlight hits the room.

So there you have it – our happy little budget-friendly guest bedroom!

I absolutely love decorating rooms with white walls and bold coloured ceilings, so I’ll hopefully get to do this again in a clients home… because Martin (or his upper body) has sworn off painting another ceiling!