Amy Richards, a Kewadin resident and Char-Em speech therapist, sits in the guest room she redecorated after being named one of four finalists in eBay and Family CircleÕs Designing Small Spaces contest. Voting for the winner commences Jan. 9 at www.ebay.com/smallspaces. Photo by Gretchen Augustine

So when the Kewadin resident came across a decorating contest on the auction Web site, she immediately set to work on the entry, which was due only a few days later.

There was a word limit on the required essay and it took her hours to get the picture right, which she said her husband thought was ridiculous.

"I gave a lot of thought -- put a lot of time in on that essay," she said.

In the end, the time paid off, because in early October, she found out she was one of four finalists.

Beginning Monday, Jan. 8, Richards will vie with three other contestants for votes in eBay and Family Circle's Designing Small Spaces contest, housed at www.ebay.com/smallspaces. Richards, a speech therapist with Char-Em, was given $2,000 to spend on eBay to redecorate her guest room.

Richards said the guest room "used to be the room that everything got shoved into." Even so, it wouldn't have been redecorated if not for the contest.

"I wouldn't have done it for a long, long time," she said, explaining that she would have redone the dining room rather than a room to which she could shut the door.

When entering the contest, Richards knew she needed a theme around which to decorate the room. She chose an Arts and Crafts style because she liked the period and wanted to use nature in the design.

The essay was supposed to include ideas on how the entrant would search for items on eBay, and Richards got inspiration for the writing assignment by looking at the entries of previous contest winners. Though she's not a "themey" person, she wrote an essay to accomplish her mission.

Richards isn't an interior designer, but she liked the idea of redecorating a room.

"I like nice stuff," she said. "I'm not usually willing to pay for nice stuff."

A perk of being a finalist was working with eBay consultant Shawn Henderson, but Richards said she didn't use many of the decorating ideas the consultant offered.

Henderson told her that to win, she'd have to paint the room, which is deep turquoise. But Richards and her husband, Scott, didn't want to.

"We agreed we wouldn't pain the room because I like the color," he said.

The consultant suggested that Richards at least unify the room by repainting window and door trim and staining the doors to match the furniture. Again, Richards didn't.

Instead, she used Henderson's suggestion of unifying the room by using a leaf-print fabric in several places throughout it.

In the before picture, which is available online, Richards' room is -- as she wrote in her entry essay -- home to furniture that's "a mish mash of cast offs" and the turquoise walls clash with an olive green comforter.

The redone room is a complete switch despite the fact that she didn't paint.

"I'm going to view it as a challenge," she wrote on her contest blog. "How much impact can I make without painting?"

The answer is: a lot. Richards' guest room is homey and uses much of the Arts and Crafts style.

She used the $2,000 to purchase an L-shaped Mission- style desk and tables, fabric, a new comforter, frames, lamps and her favorite: an iris tile made in Ann Arbor and framed by another artist.

"I loved that it's from Ann Arbor," she said. "I like that it's part of the modern Arts and Crafts movement."

The best part of the contest was shopping with someone else's money, she said. She otherwise wouldn't have spent the money on the tile.

Scott Richards said his wife invested a lot of time into the project, but the time spent was worth it.

"There was a little more justified means to an end," he said.

The contest helped prove an eBay stereotype wrong: that it's just "trade my junk for your junk," he added. The idea of the contest was to show that with $2,000, a person can complete a $5,000 redo.

Though he said eBay doesn't promote shopping locally, it did lead Amy Richards to the Mission-style desk, which she found in Houghton Lake.

"It's really funny to find the desk in Houghton," she said. "I wouldn't have found it without eBay."

In the end, she thinks she has a good chance of claiming the top prize. The winner will come down to taste because each finalist used a completely different style, she said.

"I hope people vote for me because they think I deserve to win," she said. "But if they don't, I hope they vote for me because we're all from Michigan."

The grand prize winner gets $5,000, but she'll be satisfied if she doesn't win it:

"Like I said to my husband, we already won ... someone just gets to win a little bit more."