Neighboring

When we moved here, we changed our plans for our third bedroom. We intended to make it a home gym, and I had a whole Pinterest board ready to go with decorating ideas and inspirations. But before we even finished painting rooms, we changed our minds.

We decided we wanted a guest room.

It seemed silly, in some ways, because we don't have a lot of far-out-of-town friends. Most of the people who would come to visit live within easy driving distance. Even while we drove to IKEA to pick out the bed for the room, I wondered if we were investing wisely in this square of space in our house.

A gym, we would use every day. It would benefit us.

A guest room, we would use now and then, probably mostly then...and while it would be more fun to make a cozy guest room than a gym, I just wasn't sure.

I'm sure now.

 A couple of months ago, we had our first guest: Ryan's mom. She had just been released from the hospital and stayed with us for a few days while she regained her strength. I loved being able to offer her privacy and rest.

Mo {you remember Mo, right? Our amazing sleeper couch?} is great, and we love sleeping on it now and then, but when you have company, it's nice to be able to offer a room...with a door.

After the tornadoes came through on Wednesday, we were fortunate that we still had power when over 20,000 in town did not. We had lights and air conditioning, wifi and more TV channels than we could possibly watch.

So we offered our humble little guest space to one of Ryan's co-workers. She showed up late in the evening, and I have to admit, that guest room looked inviting even to me! The little lamps were glowing, and I'd scribbled a message on the reclaimed window we added to the wall after the photo above was taken.

We sat around in the living room for a while, where I was a perfectly LOUSY hostess, nodding off to sleep {a day of hyperventilating can sure take a lot out of a person!} while she talked with Ryan.

I loved going to sleep knowing we'd been able to help someone by sharing what we have. I loved waking up and answering the door to one of my other friend who needed a place to shower and get ready for work, since her house was without power too.

It's not a bed and breakfast. {I offered breakfast to both but they both declined. Perhaps I should work on my cooking skills!} I ran around with bedhead and clutched my coffee cup like I do on any other day of the week. I asked stupid questions and struggled to comprehend in the early morning moments. But even though I wasn't a polished hostess, I loved being a neighbor.

Throughout the day, I saw glimpses of the city neighboring in their own ways. There were, of course, all the things you would expect after a tornado. People hauled clothing and food to shelters and drop-off points, guys with chain saws looked for trees in need of removal. But there was more. The city schools closed for the day, so a bunch of high school students used their free day to clean up debris. A handful of people put clothing, pantry items, and free lunches on tables outside their houses for volunteers and those affected. A coffee shop gave free coffee to officers.

That was neighboring. Each of us doing our own little things to impact a life or two around us. And for Shafferland, it meant opening our home, and I loved it. I loved being close enough TO help.

I'm so glad we did a guest room instead of a gym. I think it's my way of neighboring.

Meet Our Guest Room

Last month I gave you the tour of our new house, and I left out one room because at that time, it still held the title "The Room of Horror." It was the one room where we threw everything we hadn't yet dealt with, and I guarantee no guest would have dared step one foot inside the space that would eventually become the guest room.

And in truth, it's still not done. Not like I want it to be. But I've reached the place where it's good enough to show you and blank enough to continue propelling me to be creative in finishing touches. So today I wanted to show you what I lovingly call our bare bones guest room.

This is the room we did the least amount of work to {and please bite your tongue from saying "AND IT SHOWS!!" - ha!} It was painted the same tan color as the rest of the house, and since there were no dings or nicks, we just left it. Originally I had planned to paint it, but I changed my mind. {For as much as I love to paint, all the other painting made me willing to call a painting truce on this room.}

I should also mention that originally this room was supposed to be a home gym. We had converted a spare bedroom at our old house into a home gym and loved it, but when we moved here, I started wishing we had a guest room. Even though we typically don't have a lot of overnight guests, there was something in me that made me ache to have a place to offer any who might pass through, and we had plenty of space to work out in the living room here. {That was not true of our old house.} So we switched the plans and made a guest room.

Ironically the only overnight guest we've had since moving came before the room was done and had to sleep on Mo in the living room. Whoopsie!

Our guest room is simple, but I wanted to show you some of my favorite parts. I wanted it to be a welcoming and comfortable place for anyone to stay, so here is our attempt at just that:

You can't see it in this picture, but we have my cedar chest in this room. It was my grandmother's and I treasure it! {We use it for storage, which is another bonus, but it provides a good shelf of sorts for guests to place their things at an easy-to-reach level.} I put this tray on it, which guests could easily carry over to the bed if they had a drink or something and needed a level place to put it. The tray was a wedding gift. The vase was a gift from Lynne when I started working at WBCL, and the candle was a housewarming gift. We got the flowers at the dollar store so the vase wouldn't sit empty between guests. {I plan to add a little note to the tray for each guest.}

The color scheme for this room is black/white/gray with red accents. Ryan and I purchased this shelf for our old house, so we put it in here with our black S monogram and some battery operated candles. I thought that would create a welcoming glow when we have guests.

Found this little printable on Pinterest and put it in a dollar store frame - we can write our Wi-Fi password in dry erase marker when we have guests! The little jar was a Christmas gift and the flowers came from the dollar store again.

This was one of the few pieces we bought specifically for the house. We happened upon it when we went on our date to Junk n Java, and it was perfect. {And well priced, too, I might add.} It was made locally from reclaimed wood, and it was the only red one they had! I plan to add more things to the shelves {books, maybe a snack basket, etc.} and thought paired with the mirror we already owned, it would make a convenient second station to get ready in case two people stay and one is using the sink area in the bathroom!

Handmade bowl we received as a wedding gift and some little doo-jobbies I bought long ago at Hobby Lobby.

Another of my favorite pieces: a little box made from reclaimed barnwood. Got it back when I worked at the station and just love it.

I don't have a ton of Thirty-One products, but this was one of the first ones I purchased when someone invited me to a party years ago. I have no idea what this tote is called or if they still make it, but I have it filled with comfy throw blankets in case someone wants to lounge with a blanket.

Lamps I bought years ago at TJ Maxx {sitting on plant stands, by the way}. The room has overhead lighting, but I wanted to add a few softer touches because I just think bedrooms should be relaxing that way.

The bed was the one actual INVESTMENT we made in the room. It was a tricky one, but we found the perfect solution. {At IKEA, of course.} The room is an average sized bedroom that can be accused of being neither too big nor too small. We thought about the potential guests we might have, and we realized sometimes it might be just one person and sometimes a couple - or a small family. How could we accommodate everyone without overcrowding the room for day-to-day life?

Enter this bed from IKEA. It's got a daybed frame, so there are no clunky headboards and footboards sticking up into the middle of the room. It has two storage drawers, which is really helpful. The best part, though? While it sits as a twin, half of it slides out, making it double in size, creating a king bed. Stores as a twin, sleeps as a king. YES. This is our bed.

So when we went to IKEA on my birthday, this little guy was our big purchase. It comes in black or white but since we had the color scheme we did, we went with black.

We got a reversible black/gray comforter at Wal-Mart, added a small handful of clearance throw pillows, and called it done for now!

I have more tweaking to do in this room...I'd like to add more wall art, change out some details about existing wall art, get more throw pillows, and add other random accents, but I am ready to declare the guest room open and accepting company!

So to recap, we really did nothing to the room, other than take down the wall mounted TV the former owners left, we added furniture and wall art, and called it done! Simple but comfy!

We also have a guest bath - not attached, but right nearby - and we hadn't planned to paint this room either, UNTIL....

...we took down the air freshener hanging on the wall and found this:

 Why yes! Someone painted around the air freshener! So we had paint that whole wall! We used the same blue Autumn Fog color from our kitchen and master bedroom because I didn't want to buy a whole new can of paint for one tiny bathroom wall.

This room, too, needs more decoration on the walls. It's a Colts bathroom, and we like it. Got the shower curtain at TJ Maxx, used some wall art we already had{need to add more!} and we purchased Braeya's kitty potty for this room too. It's a decorative piece that fits over the litter box so it's not so unsightly. And it creates an extra surface space for the room too, so that's nice.

So without further ado, here are the before and after pics of the guest spaces! {And my apologies for flipping the before and after in the first duo!} Click to enlarge.

I think this completes the home tour! For now!

Slow Goodbyes: The Room That's Seen it All

As I write these goodbyes to our home, I'm amazed at how many rich and full memories can be packed into rooms that in the grand scheme of rooms, are not all that big.

Today's room may win the prize for most functions. Technically it's a bedroom, but I think it's seen as much {maybe more!} life as another kind of room as it has a bedroom. {Including right now!}

The room isn't huge, but it still boasts its original hardwood floors and has a surprisingly nice-sized closet for being in a house that was built before closets were really a thing. And my mother's favorite part about this room is her birth. Right within these four now-yellow walls, she came into the world and took her first breath. My aunt probably did too. Life actually began in this room and much life has been lived in it since.

My grandparents used it as their bedroom much of the time, and I remember watching Grandma tug at the rolled blinds each morning until they scurried up and let the light flow in for the day. Back then it had royal blue carpet and an accordion door that never quite wanted to stay shut like it should.

By the time my sister bought this house in 2000, the room had been given quite an overhaul. Melissa, who lived here between Grandma's death and our repurchase of the home, had pulled up the royal blue carpet and refinished the gorgeous hardwoods underneath. She'd painted the walls a classy forest green and hung sheer curtains at the windows. I think she used the room as kind of a little study area, and the accordion door had long been removed.

I had two roommates in my early years here, and it was the room each of them used as their bedroom. When Angela moved out in 2004, I decided to make it my bedroom. The forest green walls felt a bit like they were closing in on me, so armed with a can of bright yellow paint I acquired free of charge from a friend at church, I painted those walls, and the room remains that cheery yellow to this day.

In the last twelve years, the room has rotated through a variety of functions. As I said, it started as my bedroom, and it was the last room in which I slept on the twin half-a-bunk I'd brought with me from my parents' house. When I moved into a different room, I transitioned this into my office and craft room, and I wrote a lot of articles, blogs, journal entries, Bible studies, and even my first book right in this very room. I made hundreds of cards and scrapbooked my single life and invited friends over to join me in crafting. For a short while, this was a guest room of sorts, with an air mattress that possessed a stubborn hole that refused to stay patched. And Ryan and I used it as a sitting room, too, when we had two sets of living room furniture and needed a place to put one. Most recently, it was our dining room, and we not only ate some of our own meals in there, but we invited friends over to gather around our tall, square table and enjoy the smallest kinds of feasts.

As we prepare to leave, the latest function of this room is our home gym. This is the room where we meet each day to sweat it out on the floor mats covering the hardwoods. This is where we dab our wet faces with towels and slurp water on ten second breaks before resuming the jumping and punching. This is the room where we fall to the floor thirty minutes later, exhausted and relieved that the workout is over. It's been a good purpose for this room, although we occasionally crash into the pile of boxes waiting in the corner, boxes on deck to be packed.

{Sorry for the poor photo quality. It goes along with our current state.}

Our new home will have a "home gym" as well, and while I plan to change the color away from yellow, I've been mentally decorating, excited to see how it comes together to inspire us to keep working out.

A little room with about eight million times more memories than size. I've asked much of this room and it has delivered everything required - starting with my mother's life.

The Saturday Six

One.

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I cherish the friends I have made through blogging, and one of them is Karen. I don't even remember now how I stumbled upon her original blog, but what cemented my draw to her was that she grieved the loss of her little one {you know how tender my heart is toward infant loss}...whose name was Rebekah Joy - just like mine. Karen has a new blog now, and we've remained friends over these years....and this past week, she shared her heart about her loss of her Rebekah Joy. I wanted you to meet this little baby whose life is precious and who shares my name.

Two.

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Maybe not all of you are writers, but even if you're not, I have a feeling you can find something that makes sense in your heart from this post by Emily Freeman. Because sometimes the prospect of doing something that will dig up your heart is just plain scary.

Three.

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I stumbled upon this article this week by fiction writer Cynthia Ruchti. I realize probably most of you who read are not authors, but if you are - or if you ever have a chance to do a radio interview at all - READ THIS!!! She nailed every important thing I think anyone needs to know regarding giving a good interview. Former producer, standing to applaud.

Four.

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Since it appears God must want us to stay in our humble home for the time being, I'm always on the lookout for things to make it a little more streamlined. Recent dream? Have a real guest room. For the first two years of our marriage, there was only one bed in our whole home, and it was ours. Last year, as you might remember, we bought our couch we love so much...Mo...and it pops up into a queen size bed, giving us a place to put two more people. That's come in handy this year with visitors! But I still dream of making one of our bedrooms int a guest room. Problem: it's so small, even a double bed would take up WAY too much of the space, especially considering for the bulk of the time, we would not be using the bed. Enter THIS gem from IKEA...which I think would solve every problem. Extra seating when not needed for a bed, but provides a bed for one or two: YES PLEASE. I shall now start saving my pennies. 

Five.

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Maybe you saw this post already, but if not, and if you have an area of your life where Satan seems to have you locked up...read this. Beth is talking specifically to those praying to be released from food-related strongholds, but the prayers written within here can fly across the board to so many things. I have a feeling I'll need to refer to this one frequently. 

Six.

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I am hooked on small town life these days. I don't know why; I'm sure it's a phase that will pass. But since I don't live in the small town Mayberry atmosphere, I sure do love it when I have the chance to read about life in such a place, and my latest read, Murder at the Courthouse by A.H. Gabhart satisfied my thirst for another spin through small town USA.

A.H. Gabhart is Ann Gabhart, and her name was familiar to me from my days at the station, but I'd not read her books before. She sure pulled me in with this one! Here's what I liked about it: it had enough whodunnit in it to satisfy my inner Criminal Minds loving self, but the story wasn't presented in such a scary way that I jumped a mile every time the house creaked while I read. It had enough small town in it to make me diagnose the characters in the vein of the Andy Griffith show...clear down to a Barney and an Emma Brand...but the town wasn't so hokey that it annoyed me. And it had just the perfect touch of romance. Not heavy, but not missing.

The book is set in Hidden Springs, Kentucky, population 732...or it had been until the morning Miss Willadean Dearmon found a body murdered on the courthouse steps, smack in the middle of town.  How in the world a complete stranger ended up dead in the middle of town in broad daylight was befuddling at best, but that was the exact situation Deputy Sheriff Michael Keane found himself in after Miss Willadean marched into his office to file a complaint about the man on the courthouse steps.

Michael works his way through the town, from the trouble-making teen to the nosy newspaper reporter to the barber who knows everything about everyone, and even down the memory lane of his own past...or as much of it as he can remember, after an accident when he was a teenager left him with gaping holes in his mental history. The dots are there...he just has to figure out how to connect them and put this small town back in a peaceful state of mind again.

I learned at the end, that there will be a book two in this Hidden Springs Mystery Series, and I'm excited. I love this little town and think I would love living there, even if the only house for sale was next to the busybody Miss Willadean!

This is a fun read with an exciting amount of suspense and some awfully lovable townsfolk.

* Special thanks to Revell for sending a book my way in exchange for a review. Opinions are my own! * 

Show Us Your Life: Guest Room

I can finally participate in Show Us Your Life again after a couple of weeks out. This week is guest room week - and that's a room that is actually (for the most part) put together in my house!

I contemplated painting this room this summer but I couldn't justify spending the time or the money when the paint on the wall is fine (and was free!) so it stayed this bright yellow. Should be cheery to wake up to!

I decided to do kind of a beach theme in this room, so I ordered a large print of this sunset picture I took this summer on Lake Webster. Very happy with the way it turned out - only wish I'd have gotten it one size bigger! (I wasn't sure how it would look enlarged so I was too conservative.)

I have a few more floating shelves that my friend Greg hasn't had a chance to hang up for me yet...hence the slight incomplete state of this room. But I do have two of them up...and here's one. Love this little pray sign. Lynnette gave it to me for my birthday.

The closet in my guest room is my stamping/scrapping supply closet, so the end table is really a wooden file cabinet that holds all my card stock. :) I like it. Got it on clearance at Wal Mart a few years ago and my roommate at the time, Angela, put it together for me. Little lamp...some coasters and candles...and of course...an obnoxious alarm.

You can also see the blue curtains. I just got those (on clearance) this summer. They're the blackout kind so if I have morning-hating guests, they're set.

I also decided to use water pictures to decorate. Extra helpful was the fact that I went to the ocean in May, spent several weekends in the summer at the lake, and visited a beach in Tennessee when I was there with Faith. Didn't have to look far for pictures!

This hangs above the scrapping closet...

This dresser was my Grandma's - I love it! Holds all the bedding for the guest room. The pottery has blue seashells I picked up at the ocean this summer.

Love my little picnic basket. One of my life dreams is to go on a real summer picnic sometime and put it to use.

My guest bed is really a futon that I got almost 10 years ago. Okay so not the most comfy but it works. I'd love to someday get a better futon/mattress. Futon works great in my house because the rooms aren't very big. I also got (during college sales) these two ottomans that are storage ottomans. Love them. I bring them out into the living room for footstools for the loveseat sometimes. And I found this rug on clearance a few weeks ago and thought it tied in well with the blue curtains.

A couple of years ago, my big honking elliptical machine bit the dust - beyond repair. So...I found this mini stepper and it slides right under the futon when not in use. PERFECT size for this house.