The Van Gogh Is a "Go" Again

Van Gogh Guest Bedroom in 2009

Lord have mercy, it takes me longer than a month of Sunday sermons to ever get some things done. Take, for instance, the rear guest bedroom on the north side of the house, dubbed "The Van Gogh." (In a past iteration, it was decked out with various prints of Van Gogh paintings.)

Plaster Restored, Floors & Mantle Refinished, Freshly Painted in 2014

When I undertook plaster restoration, painting, and refinishing of the mantles and floors in the latter half of 2014, I decided at the last minute to include the front room that will someday be my study. That room had been the dumping ground for all my boxes and books and everything else from the time I bought the house, and then it was made much worse when I left the faculty of Wake Forest and had to bring all my office stuff home.

The study was the last room to get renovated in the fall of 2014 (well, before I also decided to finish out the attic!), and so I had to clear it out. Since the Van Gogh had just been remodeled and was barely furnished, it was the logical alternative for all that storage stuff:

In the intervening two years, it's been a challenge to find (1) the time and (2) the motivation to restore the Van Gogh to proper use as a guest room (I mean: it has its own private bathroom, for pete's sake!).  When the Christmas holidays rolled around, though, I finally got inspired enough. And it really was a full four-day project!

And another bonus: I ended up finding lots and lots of things either lost or long forgotten, and I couldn't be more pleased about that, either.

I'm pretty pleased for now with the result. The finishing touches of getting up some wall hangings and the full-length mirror were completed at the end of May. Still to do: drapes and valances...

Long-time Roediger House crew likely remember that the tall-lamped corner you see in the above picture is the corner which once held a very small full bathroom, before I added on new ones (door to the right) in 2008-2009. Here's how it looked in 2003:

Also, towards the end of this old blog post, you can see some other pictures that sort of capture it...wish I'd had my wide-angle lens back then!