How We Turned An Unattractive Rental Property Into a Welcoming Airb&b
A giant confluence of bits and pieces
A year ago, Jan and I were visiting my son in Pensacola, Florida.
“I’m going to turn one of my apartments into an Airbnb. The current lease is up in October. We’d love it if you two came down here next winter and spent a couple months with us. You could stay there.”
Jan and I live 4000 miles apart, and Pensacola is another 900 miles from me. This takes some arrangement. But we let him know we would be there right after the new year.
Sometime in December, he let us know that he hadn’t had time to do anything about the AirB&B apartment, but maybe we could help get it put together.
“And mom, I really appreciate your expertise in feng shui for the project.”
Adult children don’t often come around and say, “I need what you know.”
Jan designs and builds biogas installations. He walks onto a site somewhere in the world, looks at the problem and the resources, and immediately sees how energy, waste, and life can move through it in a way that actually works.
I look at a room and feel what it’s been holding, and its potential. He looks at a room and sees bones. Between us, not much gets missed.
The first view entering this apartment is the kitchen. Not the best feng shui, but...
EEK. Every cabinet. Deep Purple. I genuinely tried to reconstruct a vision of the time and circumstance that made that color such a great idea. Someone had stood in this very spot, looked at a paint chip, and thought — yes, that’s the one.
Sanding, taping, priming twice, two coats of paint—4 total because deep purple does not just go away easily—and finally, those cabinets were white. After three days of intense work, the possibilities for this space lifted 1000%.
We caulked around the bathtub, disassembled the faucet to clean it out, and put in a new shower head. Down on our knees, doing the unglamorous thing, let the caulk dry overnight, redo until it was filled and smooth, then miraculously matched the paint at Home Depot and made it look as good as new once the paint finally dried. It was touch-and-go; the paint match wasn’t a certainty at first.
My son and daughter-in-law donated some furniture and paintings they no longer wanted to the project.
One was a painting of a Parisian Cafe. Warm evening light, cobblestones, a street that makes you slow down just looking at it. I walked it from room to room, held it up, stepped back, shook my head, and moved on. Nothing was clicking.
Then I carried it to the end of the galley kitchen — just to try it. Voila! That tight corridor of a kitchen suddenly had somewhere to go. It opened right up into a Paris late afternoon.
Imagine you’re standing there prepping dinner, when the kitchen invites you to sit down at a beautiful, relaxing café table for a glass of wine after a busy day.
In feng shui, the bedroom is the most important room because you spend the most time there. A blue velvet headboard was the one thing donated for this room.
One of the many joyful aha moments was finding just the right artwork at a local secondhand store to place over the bed. The colors matched the blue velvet headboard perfectly. In addition, we found bedside tables with electrical and USB outlets (who doesn’t need their bedside phone charger) that fit perfectly on each side of the tight spaces left by the king-size bed.
I stepped back and thought about whoever was going to lie down in that bed for the first time, tired from traveling or a day at the beach, who looks up and reads those words. “In this home by the beach, we wake up smiling, live love and laugh, count our blessings, always kiss goodnight.”
The donated bones for the living dining area were a conglomeration of mismatched styles and colors. A green velvet couch, a brown leather chair, a brushed gold and glass top coffee table, a couple of blue lamps with no shades, a modern wood dining set for eating or working. Plus, a set of wildflower paintings.
And then there was the coffee table...
I wanted to throw that coffee table out. But I was trying to make this transition to Airbnb as cost-effective as possible, and the glass top made sense if people would set drinks on the table. So, I focused on finding end tables for the couch that would blend in. Bingo! The perfect pair showed up – the right size, same metal color, and glass top.
The room was looking like it was planned from the beginning. We adjusted the paintings of wild flowers over the couch. I wanted one more thing to pull it together. To say HOME.
I found a red basket while out looking for accessories. Woven cloth, sturdy, the right scale. I bought it because there’s a red flower in the painting above the couch, and I wanted that color to land somewhere else in the room — an echo,so the space feels pulled together, intentional. I set the basket on the coffee table and put the TV remotes in it. Stood back. Yup. Perfect accent piece.
It was beautiful and useful at the same time, which is the way I love to work.
Then we were done.
I walked through one last time — just absorbing the transformation.
The kitchen opened into Paris. The bedroom made its promises quietly from the wall. The red basket sat there looking like it was meant to be. The whole place felt like someone had cared about making sure whoever walked in sighed with relief, thinking: “This is where I want to be. Practical, beautiful, safe. Maybe I’ll stay a little longer.”
My son entrusted me with creating this project.
The rewards ran from the heart of the family all the way to the heart of the home, or in this case, the heart of the Airbnb.
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Bonus photos just for fun:
