As planned, our local Habitat for Humanity ReStore picked up our donation items yesterday. Between that and moving a stack of frames and accessories into the future playroom for now, the guest bedroom finally stopped feeling like a storage zone and started to feel like a real room again.

It’s not yet ready for the in-laws, who arrive on Thursday, but at least it no longer looks like a junkyard.

After we put Clara to bed last night, we decided to earn a few brownie points and paint the room. We figured it would be easier to paint while the space was empty — the new bed arrives early next week — and with Clara asleep we could work without interrupting her routine. So we seized the night and started rolling.

By morning the room already felt transformed. What began as a cluttered, makeshift guest space now had clean walls and a fresh basecoat. The first coat we applied reads like a stony pale blue in some lights and hints at purple in others. It’s neutral enough that it won’t offend most guests, and it could even work for a future nursery if we decide to go that route. Sleek and calm, right?

Okay, full disclosure: that color you see now is just tinted primer, not the final paint. We couldn’t resist an early reveal, but it was a deliberate move: the tinted primer reads much darker than typical primers and gives you a strong preview of the final direction. Tinted primer helps when you’re committing to a deep, saturated paint color because it improves coverage and makes the true color come through with fewer topcoats.

We’ve been itching to try a dramatic, moody color somewhere in the house, and the guest bedroom felt like the perfect place to experiment. It’s a relatively small room with two walls that have windows plus another window in the adjoining bathroom, so it still gets a fair amount of natural light even with a darker hue. We like the idea of an enveloping, cocoon-like space for overnight guests — many of our favorite hotel rooms have deep, saturated walls that feel cozy rather than oppressive.

The shade we’re using is very dark and definitely outside our typical comfort zone, but that risk is part of the fun. There’s something thrilling about choosing a bold color for a quiet room. We’ll withhold the exact name until the paint is fully on the walls and we have photos to share — color names and swatches rarely capture how a tone actually reads in a lived-in room, so we prefer showing the finished result.

This project is also our first time using tinted primer. Given how deep the final color will be, we thought tinting the primer would help the paint achieve an even, rich finish with fewer coats. We chose an environmentally friendly option labeled as 100% VOC free and reasonably priced per gallon. Compared to old-school oil-based primers, this water-based primer was easy to use and far less pungent. It was a bit thin, though, so we had to watch for drips and wipe them up as we went. That’s probably just the nature of many modern, water-based primers — they behave differently from the heavier oil formulations people used years ago.

Hopefully the tinted primer will do its job and we won’t need an excessive number of paint coats to get the deep, saturated tone we’re aiming for. We only bought one gallon of paint so we’re crossing our fingers that one gallon, paired with the tinted primer, will be enough to achieve the rich finish we want.

Next up: the final coats and styling. Once the paint is on and the bed is in, we’ll share pictures and reveal the final color. For now it’s nice to have the room cleared out, primed, and very much on its way to becoming a proper guest bedroom instead of a catch-all.