Tour an A-Frame Bungalow With Budget-Friendly Design Features

Whitney Bradberry, a freelance marketer in Kittredge, Colorado, says she’s always had a love for A-frame cabins. When she spotted one while browsing listings out of curiosity that she thought she and her husband, Andrew, might like, she went out to see it right away and ended up persuading Andrew over FaceTime that they should put in an offer. Within six months, they turned it into Front Range A-Frame, a cabin rental that enjoyed immediate success on Airbnb. Read on for tips on how to decorate your Airbnb (or home) on a budget while still keeping things hip and neat.

What they thought might be a two- or three-month DIY project -- turning this 1960s cabin into an Airbnb rental -- turned into half a year of spare time and weekends spent working on renovations, prepping for future guests and piecing together a gorgeous cedar hot tub. “We basically spent every single second we had there for six months,” Whitney says. Along the way, she documented their renovation journey on Instagram and through newsletters she sent out, keeping people up to date on the status of the project and when it would be open for rentals. The result? The cabin has been nearly fully booked all summer long, and well into fall.

Whitney and Andrew took down a wall separating the kitchen from the living room to open up the space and let this tile accent wall play a starring role in the decor for the space. Whitney didn’t want the space to feel too modern — “I want it to feel the way it was meant to be,” she says, adding that she looked at old photos of the house when they were working on the project. She wanted the kitchen tile to be vintage, unique and “more playful than something I would maybe put in my own home,” she says. “I had seen some star-shaped tiles and started just looking around to find one that fit into our budget,” she says, and ultimately found this one at Home Depot.

Taking down the wall that used to separate the kitchen from the rest of the house was the most significant change Whitney and Andrew made to the house, and it enables the kitchen tile to act as an accent wall for the whole house. “Andrew is really detail-oriented, which is great for actually executing on the renovation,” she says. “When he’s going to remove a wall, he’ll sketch it out and envision the space that way. I create ideas in my head — it’s like a giant Pinterest board in there — but he somehow gets it, and it works.”