Turning Our Guest Room Into A Lounge

Welcome to our new and improved back bedroom lounge! I doubt any of you who have been following along with me for the past few years will be surprised that I ditched our traditional guest room to create a living space since I did exactly that at our old house. We simply love living rooms, and I suppose that we’re a little addicted to creating cozy lounging spots all over our home. While living in our old house, we ultimately carved our three entirely separate living rooms, and we’re now on our fourth one here at our “new” house two years in. Our pets love a good couch, and so do we, apparently!

Those photos above show what our guest room looked like just a few short weeks ago. It was lovely and we appreciated knowing that we had a space for overnight guests to stay. Realistically, though, the bed had been used only a handful of times since we moved to this house back in 2022, and mostly by us when we were sick or couldn’t sleep in our main bedroom for whatever reason (like when we were in the middle of taking down the old wallpaper in our room). Our pets used the guest bed way more than any humans ever did, and they certainly didn’t need a full-size bed. A sofa or chair would serve them just fine, so I got it into my head to get rid of the guest room yet again to make way for a new lounge living space that we could all make properly good use of.

Around the time that I had this lightbulb moment, one of my favorite, most trusted furniture companies reached out to offer one of their sleeper sofas to us in exchange for a blog review (coming soon). It was the perfect excuse for us to officially say goodbye to our guest bed and move our existing sofa to the now-cleared-out extra bedroom. The blank spot in our formal living room will soon be filled with our new sleeper sofa, and once that finally arrives, we’ll actually have room for overnight guests after all! They’ll just be situated in our living room rather than in the back bedroom.

Note: I would have put the new sleeper sofa in the back bedroom, but the dimensions meant it wouldn’t fit. Our old sofa, though, was a great size for this small bedroom.

Since moving our sofa to the back bedroom (and restyling the room with a fresh new rug in honor of the occasion), we’ve already used the room so much more than we ever did when it was a guest room. There’s no TV in this room, but that doesn’t bother me. I use it mostly for playing with our three pets on the floor or for reading. The four living rooms in our home are all scattered widely across the expanse of our extra wide ranch home, so I’m able to move from space to space throughout the day chasing the light. It works so well for me as a work-from-home creative, and I love having all sorts of options when it comes to my lounging habits.

Would you ever consider swapping your guest room out for a bonus lounge living space? Like I said, we did this at our last house, and it was such a cozy spot. I never regretted it, and we were even able to sell that house without having to turn the space back into a guest room for prospective buyers, so don’t let fears of resale stop you! You can read my (unexpectedly passionate) opinion about that design dilemma here on my Home Matters newsletter if you’re interested in getting my advice for designing your home for real life versus resale. Anyway, let me know in the comments if you think you’d try this design choice out in your own home, or if you already have.

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