Ideas and Inspiration for Our Guest Bedroom

When we first moved into our house almost every single room was beige.  And beige just happens to me the worst color in the world, in my opinion.  I hate it.  So we started, slowly but surely, painting the various rooms in our house.  We immediately started with our living room (grey) and our kitchen (a mossy green).  Then in 2010 we updated our bedroom (one of the few rooms that wasn't painted beige) and in 2011 we livened up our dining room.  The only rooms left untouched in the house now are the bathroom and the guest bedroom.  The bathroom, which is the only other non-beige room in the house now, needs a little more than a coat of paint.  It's the only room in the house that wasn't remodeled before we bought it, so it is going to take more time and money to update than we have at the moment.  Since the bathroom is on the back burner at the moment we decided to tackle the guest bedroom this summer.

The guest bedroom is the room in the house where we just kind of throw stuff and store it...when we don't have guests.  The door is kept closed most of the time, so we kind of forget about it.  Most of the furniture is from my college/post-college days, but it's fairly decent stuff that just needs a little face-lift.  Here's some of the ideas I've been throwing around in my head regarding the guest bedroom:

     1.) Currently I have a slightly awful Indian inspired(?) comforter on the guest bed.  I loved it when I was seventeen, but now it's just an eyesore.  I'd like to swap that our for a nice down comforter and an oversized granny square afghan.  I found this excellent sunburst granny square tutorial from Nittybits.
     2.) Using this tutorial I've started working on an afghan.  I'm going for lighter shades in the center with a cream colored square surrounding them.
     3.) We recently purchased the color for the room during Sherwin William's big anniversary sale.  It's called Silver Peony.
     4.) We're planning on framing some of my photos and I'm leaning towards these Ribba frames from Ikea.  I love when a frame comes with a mat (of course I'll use our mat-cutter at work to customize it perfectly)!
     5.) Antoine has a pretty impressive collection of Rob Jones posters, most of them White Stripes or Raconteurs, and they're scattered throughout our house.  Yet there's still a bunch that we haven't hung, so we're planning to use the extra wall space in the guest bedroom to hang up the remainder and I like the idea of clustering them together like this.  This post offers some great tips and tricks to hanging multiple frames.
     6.) We've got an existing desk and hope chest in the room that are in desperate need of refinishing.  I love these stairs and the idea of using different shades of stain to create a pattern, though I can't afford to pay a professional to do it and I don't have the skills to do it myself, at least not on that level.
     7.)  Something like this is a little more my speed.  I saw this "before & after" project on Design Sponge and though, hey, I could do that on my desk!  
     8.) & 9.) So, my idea is to do an abstract geometric design on the top of our desk using various shades of stains (brown tones - #9 is a quick mock-up I made using Paint) and then stain the rest of the desk in a coordinating shade.  We'll see how it goes!
     10.) I've also become mildly obsessed with the idea of making a lamp shade out of 35mm slides.  I found this pretty handy tutorial.  I just love how the light shines through the slides and illuminates them.
     11.)  Here's a better idea of what the color will look like on the walls (though this is not our guest bedroom), using Sherwin William's color visualizer.

It's my hope that once it's updated it won't be the room we just close the door to and forget about.  I'd like to keep the door open and use the room (mainly the desk) a bit more.  We shall see!