So yup. Still pregnant. Which at this point doesn't even seem possible. But I thought while waiting for this baby I'd finally post some Basement renovation pictures.... Also I'm resisting the urge to randomly cast on for a baby sweater in the hopes that if there is knitting the baby will come.... Logic left this place a week ago. Here we go!
So the first thing we knew we wanted in our
Year of Upgrades Basement Renovation was a playroom for the kids. They may have to
share a room (something that I'm not convinced is bad for them in any way) but at least they'd have a space for all of their toys. And the dream of not having toys and kid nonsense all over our house... GLORIOUS. How about some before, during, and after pictures?
Before:
Originally when we bought the house it was a pool room with a dart board and beer fridge and a whole guy paradise. We used it that way until we had kids. Then it basically became an obsolete dumping grounds for all of our random crap. We just didn't live that way anymore.
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| The scary thing is this picture was taken after we had organize things a bit. Yeah. |
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| So much crap. although the boxes are all base yarn which has been organized and relocated to my dye studio. Much more efficient! |
The walls were just flimsy partitions - 1.5" thick. Not real walls. And the rest of the basement, while probably finished at one time, was in complete disrepair. Also the way the "bathroom" was set up... well... I"ll get to that in another post. Bottom line was that any useful renovation was going to require tearing out the existing walls and reconfiguring everything.
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| All of this is gone now. |
During:
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| Walls gone, new walls being built. SO MUCH DUST. Our entire house smelled like a construction site. |
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| Getting closer! You can see the new opening cut in the wall next to the stairs and the other areas almost framed out. |
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| New sills we had fabricated to match the sills upstairs. Yay consistency! |
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| New Playroom primed and ready to paint!!! |
Oooooh the painting. We decided to do that ourselves to save some monies. Also we are insane people with the paint colors and no painter wants to deal with that nonsense. After MUCH debate (and possibly a quick rendering. AHEM) this is the color palette we went with:
Mainly greys and neutrals. My thought was that we didn't want to go dark b/c it's a basement. But we also needed to be real careful with color considering that ALL OF THEIR THINGS are crazy colorful. So no matter what we did with paint the moment we added in the toys it was going to be a color explosion. We did end up with a pop of yellow on the ceiling, though. And also an accent room (more on that later):
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| Painting finished. Ready for the new carpet and flooring! |
After:
So! The finished space ready for furniture!
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| Headed into the playroom. |
In these pictures the vinyl flooring still isn't installed in the hallway.... that was all sorts of awful and delayed and... I wanted to show the space before we put in any furniture and the furniture came before the floor. ANYWAYS!
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| It's done!!! The door that the dude is standing in leads to the stairs, the door next to him leads to my dye studio and the unfinished portion of the basement (furnace, laundry, etc). I put a lock with a key on the dye studio door. A Playroom with access to chemicals just didn't seem like a stellar plan. |
We decided to drywall one of the block walls. We left two of them exposed block both to save on costs and because we liked the look. This is a basement after all. I then took all of the wiring off of the block walls and ran it through the new drywall so that nothing was left exposed.
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| Block wall with no wiring or nonsense on it! Amazing! Also check out the new sills... they turned out so spiffy. |
We completely redid the lighting. There were just overhead exposed bulbs in odd places. We ended up doing recessed lights on the two outside portions of the room with an overhead in the center of the yellow part. I love the way it came out and as Matt will point out it sets up perfectly for turning this space into a theater room sometime in the very far off future.
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| The super wired wall with internets and cable etc. It would be perfect for a theater room. But at this point I refuse to even put in a TV. This is a play room not a plug the kids in room. If they want to watch TV they can sit down and watch it in the living room. I don't want it to just always be on in the background. So far it hasn't been a problem! |
The carpet was specifically picked to be indestructible, speckled so as not to show any dirt/crumbs/kid nonsense, but also soft enough to tumble on:
Even with just the empty space the kids LOVED it.
And then we added in the coolest toy storage ever (really) but that's another post. Until then check out the before/after comparison:
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| Before. Yuck. |
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| After |
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| Before (although we had already cleared everything out so sortof during?) |
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| After: New wall configuration, new and relocated electrical panel, new sills, carpet, paint, etc. etc. |
Yay for a finished basement playroom! I can't wait to show you guys the rest of the renovation. This was only about half of the space and isn't the dramatic part. Wait until you see the before/after of the bathroom!
