Ohana Renovations - Bedrooms - THE RICHARDSON PROJECT

We have really enjoyed our “ohana”. It’s the perfect little guest house with 3 bedrooms, 1 bath, and a full kitchen. It even has an under-counter washer and dryer.

But we wanted to freshen it up with new paint, new carpet, new ceiling fans, and recessed lighting.

Time to get to work.

Electrical

There is nothing like walking into a well-lit room. Light is really important to us. Not just from a literal standpoint, but also from a figurative and spiritual as well. We need light in our life.

When we moved in, the only lighting we had in the bedrooms came from lamps. In other words, the lighting was really poor. So that was one of the first things we decided to tackle.

Luckily, the ohana is a one-story and so we had plenty of access to add the can lights from above.

First up, cutting some holes.

We went with the LED downlights from Commercial Electric. These are slick. You can change the color temperature using a switch on the back, they’re dimmable, and they are retrofit, so if you have some old can lights that use traditional light bulb, you can replace them with this light.

This is how you change the color of the lights. We went with Neutral White on all our lights and it’s just right.

They have built in trim, so they have a nice finished look to them.

That’s MUCH better. We used this same setup in all 3 rooms.

Painting

For the first few weeks, some of the rooms had this light green hue to them. We thought it was caused by the reflection of the plants all around the windows reflecting off the white walls. Come to find out, those rooms were painted in Yucca Green–a very faint green.

We can assure you, the rooms did not look THIS green in real life. But they were definitely green.

So we knew we needed to update the color throughout. We like the light grey, but not too grey. We chose Silver Ash from Behr.

We had quite a bit of prep to get the walls ready for paint. Holes to fill, dents to patch, baseboards to replace.

This was the first pass in the “office”. Already WAY better.

Here was the final product once with the second coat and once the paint dried. The other rooms got the same color.

Carpet

Then it was time to replace that 20 year old carpet. Could not rip out that stuff fast enough!

Vacuuming newly installed carpet might be one of the most satisfying jobs ever.

Final Product

So each room got a new ceiling fan, new can lights, new paint, new baseboards, and new carpet (we have since installed new white blinds as well). Here are some before and afters:

Here is Bedroom 2. The other bedroom is basically identical to this one.

One thing the kids have missed is CARPET. Our old house in St. George had plenty of it, but our new house is quite different. It has tons of beautiful hardwood and a huge lanai, but no where that the kids can roll around on, lay down on, or wrestle on.

So once we gave the kids the go ahead, the kids did what kids typically do on carpet…