adult bedroom in the beach condo

If you’re new here, I’m sharing how we renovated a condo in Bethany Beach, Delaware, and turned it into an Airbnb. It was a long process and took us an entire year, but I’m happy with the results!

Today I’m sharing another bedroom renovation. This bedroom is upstairs, and since we already have a bunk room for kids, we figured this room would be for adults.

Here’s what it looked like when we bought the house. (The furniture conveyed with the house.)

I love the lines of the ceiling and the natural light.

The furniture was not our taste, so we donated everything in this room and started from scratch.

We wanted the room to feel light and bright. We figured the guests in here would likely be parents, tired after a long day of chasing kids at the beach — we wanted to create a serene place for them. And this room doesn’t have an ensuite bath, so we wanted to make the room special in other ways.

First, the non-sexy stuff! We brightened the room by painting it a lighter color. We sprayed all the walls and ceiling Cloud White by Benjamin Moore. And then we paid a flooring company to replace the carpet with Luxury Vinyl Tile. I hung rattan blinds on all the windows, we painted all of the HVAC registers and vents, and I installed black doorknobs throughout the house. Plus, we had an electrician add can lights and hang a ceiling fan.

Then we got to the fun part! We decided to use light colors, light wood, and lots of textures in the room. We wanted a place for people to store their clothes, a place to put on makeup, and a place to read or work on a laptop.

John bought a bed online from Article and topped it with our favorite Lucid hybrid mattress. We used our favorite Target sheets (good quality but inexpensive) and a blanket from Brahms Mount and a white duvet. We added a cream-colored throw pillow from our house.

I think one of the coolest parts of the room is this canvas John found. (He’s a big fan of Wes Anderson. I am not, but I love the lighthearted feel of this painting.) We installed plug-in sconces on either side of the bed and added inexpensive but chic nightstands with a Scandinavian feel.

We turned the window seat into a reading nook. My talented mom made a new cushion for the window seat, and we added a throw blanket from Brahms Mount plus a pillow from our house. The sconce was one I already had, and I screwed it into the wall with a battery-operated puck light — no need for an electrician! (Nesting with Grace has some great articles on how to do this, plus some sconces that work well with puck lights.)

We wanted the tired parents to have another place to crash and unwind. John found this boucle chair and ottoman from Article, and we added a chunky throw we found on clearance. The invisible bookshelf is a favorite of ours — we used the same thing in our previous Airbnb. It makes the books look more interesting, I think, and we don’t have to worry about filling up an entire bookshelf. But we need more books on this one!

We wanted to add a special touch to the room, and John found this fantastic record player online. We got a good deal on a turntable stand (we have the same one at home), and then added some art and some rackets I found at a vintage shop. We added a bunch of records after this picture was taken!

In the photo above you can also see the side table by the chair. John has wanted that for a while, and this was his chance to work it into a room design! We were getting over budget on the room by then, so I brought a faux jade plant from home rather than buying another accessory. I like the plant’s height and color here. It’s also nice that folks can set down a drink or their phone on the little table — mom always says that every chair should have a place to put up your feet, a place to put your drink, and a reading light. (No reading light here, yet, but maybe we’ll get one.)

On the wall opposite the bed, we brought in an old dresser from another room in the house and painted it French Eggshell from Fusion Paint — my absolute favorite paint for cabinets and furniture! We installed a tv on the wall and added a cord hider I learned about from Sarah at Room for Tuesday. It’s genius! You thread the electrical cord into the tube and then peel off the sticker on the tube and it attaches to the wall. It’s paintable, too, so now it matches the wall. I swapped out the drawer pulls for matte black ones from Lowes or Home Depot, and now it looks like a new dresser! We also added a full-length mirror next to the dresser (I like to put mirrors next to flat surfaces in vacation rental spaces so people have a place to put on their makeup, dry their hair, etc.)

That wall still looked plain, so I bought a faux tree online and put it in a basket from Home Goods. I propped it up with bricks and filled the basket with white patio stones from Home Depot to hide the bricks. I think every room looks better with a pop of greenery, faux or not!

And now, a video tour. Please excuse my shaky hand. And you might want to turn down your volume — I got carried away with the music.

What do you think? Do you like this room or the downstairs bedroom better? We used similar colors in both, but they feel very different. I hope our guests are happy with both of them!