WWOOFer Room Redo

Everybody, today is a special day at Sunshower Farms because one room on our entire farm is finally COMPLETE! We got our POD last week so it feels very good considering every other room is packed with furniture and boxes that haven't been set up or organized.Getting it done was a little bit down to the wire though because our first WWOOFers are coming tomorrow! It was really important to me to make it very nice too because I want them to have a really great space so that they feel comfortable and welcome.

We initially started working on the WWOOFer room shortly after we moved in. We started with a large room over the barn, with ugly stained carpet and unattractive blue paint.

The first things we did were rip up the carpet, paint the room white and install laminate wood flooring. We would have liked real hard wood, but the cost, plus the humidity up here made laminate a better choice for us. We used "Golden Aspen" and bought it at Costco.

The paint and flooring alone made the room look so much better! Then we bought mattresses when they came on sale at Costco (I swear half of our stuff is from Costco haha) and just waited for the POD with all of the rest of the furniture to arrive.

Before it came, I threw together a little pallet coffee table to go in front of the couch. There is a nursery in Kona that has tons of pallets free for the taking, and there was one that I thought was particularly well suited for a small coffee table.

I picked this particular pallet because it didn't have any gaps, which is great and unusual in a free pallet. It also had those cool circular dirt stains on the top. Building this table was really easy. I just cut four 4x4s to the same length (16.5") and then screwed them onto the bottom through the top of the table. Then I sanded and varnished the table top and called it a day. I used spray varnish before I sanded so that the dirt circles wouldn't rub off - they are one of my favorite parts of the table!

The final product - not bad for a nearly free table if I do say so myself.

When the POD got here, we got to work building the bunk beds and assembling everything! The first thing we put together was the couch. When Doug and I were home in Chicago, we bought this couch from World Market in khaki. When we were there, they were discontinuing the khaki color so we got the frame and the couch on sale for $250 total (regularly $450)!

I added two veggie throw pillows I got from Ikea too. They may be childish, but because this is a farm, I think we can get away with it. We have a carrot and a broccoli pillow.

Furniture is VERY expensive in Hawaii, so it worked well for us to just add a lot of the WWOOFer room furniture to the POD and repurpose other things we already had. Also while in Chicago, we bought some Ikea bunk beds for the WWOOFer room. Similar bunk beds here were about $800 each, and at Ikea these were only $159. Part of why they are so cheap though is that they are a HUGE pain to put together. It took probably about eight hours for Doug and Ashley to do both.

Once they were done though, it was really fun to test them out!

While they assembled, I hung the curtain rods and Ashley hemmed the curtains. We also painted the bunk beds in the orangey-brown color that we initially bought for the living room, hung art, built a little shelving unit near the door and added rugs in front of the beds and in the living area.

We added a desk from my old apartment in South Bend, and a bookcase that was in that room from before (we painted it to match the beds though).

I also put in a small corner shelf above the top bunk and installed shelving in the closet. The picture on the left is what I installed. The picture on the right is the shelving that was already there on the other side of the closet.