I have the unusual (for me) situation of having a spare room in the house. All the time we've lived here, we've hardly had a spare INCH, now I have a whole ROOM.

Since my daughter got married and moved out, this bedroom has collected a lot of odds and ends from elsewhere in the house. I'd like to give it a more pulled-together look. We plan to use it for a guest room, but it won't get used all THAT often, since all our kids live nearby now, so I also plan to use it for scrapbooking. Plus I use the closet space for storage.

Anyone else working on a spare room?

DeJavu,
When my daughter got married and moved out we turned her bedroom into a setting room with a Lazyboy sofa bed and 21 inch TV and and lamp table that we can put our books on that we are reading and did not put a phone in the setting room and the room can be used for company also. We repainted the room in cream color and purchased new curtains and left the blinds , but would to get new wood blinds they are so much easier to clean .

We have a very large family room about 25x25 ft , so this setting room is just a very calm peaceful place to read or be all to myself now. I love it.

So, this is what I did with my spare room

Reneee

dejavu, I am sitting in my spare room right now on my computer! It used to be my daughter's room. It now has a beautiful high-riser bed with a pretty deep burgundy comforter and pillows, a desk, my computer table and an end table with a pole lamp. All the wood is dark cherry. I have a theme of Patriotic America in here. My daughter calls it the "Roosevelt Room"! There are placques and pictures of flags, hearts and stars and anything I picked up in arts n' crafts stores along the way. It really is lovely and I spend lots of time in here. Rarely, but sometimes, one of my girls will sleep over and use this room. It still has a comfortable feel.

Dejavu, when we moved into this house, one of the attractions were the two spare bedrooms. We wanted to be able to have lots of space for houseguests; we especially wanted to be able to enjoy having hubby's daughter, my brother and 2 nieces stay here at the same time (like at Christmas).

So right away we furnished them as bedrooms. But as the years have gone by and one of the spare rooms only gets used 2-3 times a year, I'm really sorry we didn't furnish it as a sitting room or sewing room or even an exercise room - something more useful. If/when we ever redo it, I would like to take the bed out and put in either a sofa bed or just leave enough space for a fold-out cot. That way we can use the room for other things all year round.

That would be my suggestion - that you decide on the room's primary function for the other 95% of the year that nobody's sleeping in it and redo it according to how you plan to get the most use out of it.

That's a great idea Eagle Heart!
I had a fun time redecorating the boys bedrooms to our rooms. I changed one of the rooms into my "beach" room. Looks like a sunny beach cottage, with white and turquoise colors. That's where my standup piano is and shelves full of my favorite books. We also have a pull-out couch for overnight guests. I love that room, because we can see the sunsets from there. Oh and now I know where to put my shell collection and all those darling little wooden sailboats and fishing boat models we've been collecting over the years. It's my own little American room, where I get that Cape-Cod feeling.

My mom had a spare room (eventually she had TWO spare rooms) and even though we all lived nearby, it got a lot of use when grandkids visited. I don't have any grandkids yet but I would love to some day keep a crib in there. Which means that the queen-sized bed in there right now (no headboard, just a mattress & box spring on a frame) really should go and make way for a daybed or foldout sofa.

My scrapbooking stuff fits in there very well (a small armoire, a table, and a rolling drawer thing) but I'd eventually like to replace them with nicer furniture - the table is just one of those plastic folding tables and the chair is a non-matching folding chair.

I have two nice pieces of furniture in there - an antique desk and a rocking chair - so I'd gradually like to make the rest of the room look more attractive. I love the idea of the 'themed' rooms.

dejavu
Whatever you decide to do with that room, do it quick! I had a spare room for a year and never got around to redecorating. Needless to say, it isn't a spare room anymore. My son moved back home! LOL

I have a spare room and it gets used every other weekend by my GS. It's the last room I need to redo. I plan to decorate it in an adult version of a cowboy theme, but not hokey. I want my GS to enjoy it, but also be an interesting room for other guests.

I turned my spare room into my office. I had the other spare room ready to be decorated when THE SON moved back home. It happens, right TVC? Anyhoo...I would LOVE to have a room where I could paint a mural on the wall. Hey, I would love to know HOW to do that, too. What would it be? Why...that's easy. An English garden!

JJ

And how JJ! Right when you least expect it to, there he is! Laundry in one hand, girlfriend in the other!