Dual-purpose guest room ideas in real life

If you could design the perfect guest room, what features would you want? Would a dual-purpose room be an advantage?

Well, since we’re using the word “perfect,” I’d like a turndown service with a sliced Kilwins apple on the nightstand. That way I could feel like I was on vacation.

Hey, my needs are simple. Who needs a beach when you have a decadent apple slice?

With the birds no longer in our nest, we have three leftover bedrooms, and PLENTY of plans to fill them. Mr DustandDoghair would like a nice office as a home-away-from-home for his day job (there’s a little joke in there if you dig deep enough)… I’d like a project room in which to work and store supplies and tools for my Neverending (and never finished) Endeavors… and yes, a guestroom might be nice for the occasional visitor.

At the time, I thought I was just figuring out where to put a guest bed.
Turns out… I was setting the stage for my next Gee-I-Hope-This-Works project.. involving a wall mural.

Before I break out the apple slices..

Hey, I can deliver an apple slice to any room in our house…so THAT objective is easily met. The logistical considerations began with assigning which room for which purpose.

Originally, Mr chose the smallest room for his office. I painted the room a neutral color and moved all his equipment (that had still been occupying our bedroom since the covid lunacy).

The smallest room is at the top of the stairs…and It didn’t take long to realize that having Mr’s organized chaos as the first impression for the upstairs was No Bueno. Mr got the boot and was promptly moved to the room at the END of the hall…and moving him twice wasn’t a total loss because as anyone who watches HGTV knows: it’s MUCH easier to paint an empty room, so I did that before kicking him out of the small room.

I almost then claimed the small room for my project space…but Mr’s office chaos isn’t entirely different from my projects chaos…

And that’s when this epiphany hit:

Who’s actually going to USE these guest rooms, anyway?

My kiddos tend to stay over for big holidays and we LOVE that, and I would rather do my projects on the roof than discourage a family sleepover… Thus, one guestroom became two, and the project room idea morphed into a shared guest/project space in the largest of the three rooms.

Room number one was the one Mr just vacated and was freshly painted, so it was fairly simple to make that GR1. I repurposed one of the boys’ queen sized beds, bought a new mattress and some bedding, shopped the house for accessories and, Finis (well, “finis” if I ever select drapery fabric).

Hmm..what about a DUAL-purpose guest room?

For GR2, we briefly entertained purchasing a Murphy (fold-down) bed, which would give me lots of project space and still have space leftover for a second double bed.

Reflecting on it, however. Anytime someone used the room, I’d have to pack up all my things. And since I’m always in the middle of SOMEthing…that would be annoying as hell. So this became the room layout solution:

We already had one queen-sized Ikea storage bed…which could accommodate two people… (or so I’m told. Personally, I have slept in a king-sized bed since Mr and I wrote it unofficially into our marriage vows. The occasional times I’ve slept in a double or queen involves a entire night of silently singing “There were two in the bed and the grumpy wife said, ‘roll over, roll over…’ And they all rolled over and he fell out.”)

Who me? Nope, not priveleged at all.

SO we added a second queen-sized Ikea Brimnes storage bed…which gave me FOUR gigantic drawers to store my, shi…, ahem, things.

The Ikea beds didn’t have headboards, and I thought about adding Yet Another Project to my list, until I discovered these perfect-match candidates from Home Depot.

And THAT’S when things got super easy…for about a minute

I love watching room makeovers on TV. They clear everything out and start with a blank canvas. Not sure where they actually store all the stuff they clear out off camera. Me? I just keep rotating the contents around the room and hope I don’t trip over anything.

Eventually, everything on the Guest Room side found it’s rightful place.

And THAT’s when I took the remarkably simple idea to add a wall mural and complicated the heck out of it.

I’ll tell you all about it…. next time.