House Progress: The Basement

We're back from our week-long vacation! Lots of eating out, meeting up with friends, hanging out with family and having fun happened. I will share it with you all soon. We returned to a pack of crazy but well taken care of chickens and a wild garden that needed some water! While we are catching up on day-to-day stuff (we were essentially without internet all week), I will show you the last piece on the house tour: the basement.

As you will see, nothing is really finished in our basement (that theme seems to carry over to the rest of the house ). In some places, we are getting there, but we still have a ways to go. Going down the stairs, you will automatically walk into the laundry room/bathroom when you go forward.



The previous owners painted it a nice blue. Before Mike installed the shower upstairs, we used this bathroom for bathing so I tried to spruce it up. I put in a shower curtain that I had to cut down for size and some shelves to hold TP and toiletries.



We got fairly lucky for a basement bathroom in that the vanity has already been spruced up a little. Considering we don't really use this bathroom, I don't really have any interest in working on this room for now.



The laundry area needs some organization. Since I’m short, I tend to just keep things on top of the dryer and old bottles of detergent and fabric sheets (which we don't use) just sit on the shelve. I should have taken a picture, but the bathroom has bi-fold doors. Not so private if you’re trying to use the bathroom.



To the left of the stairs is Gizmo’s bathroom. We tried to make it nice and pretty (in our last place, we kept it in our main floor bathroom) and discreet, since she is shy on the potty. For the record, we switched her over to a walnut-based litter which is awesome. At first I thought the bags were kind of expensive, but a 25 pound bag lasts forever! And it absorbs really well, which was an issue we had with Sweat Scoop.



Moving on, we have the workout room. Mike got really into the idea of a home gym last fall and over the course of a few months acquired a treadmill, punching bag, and weight set for an in-house gym!

 

First we have the Bob punching bag, who is pretty creepy. We see him through the window in the backyard and when I come downstairs to do laundry. Sometimes I have to remind myself that Bob is not real! We bought a set of weights for super cheap on Amazon that can do up to 100 lbs. on each weight. The bench can decline and incline and works well for sit-ups as well as weight lifting.

Mike laid down mat squares on the cement for a soft-ish floor great for working out in.





I think this room would also work really well as a workshop, but since we have plans down the line to turn the other space into a home theater, I think this setup of having a workout space probably works best for us. We keep all of our tools upstairs in the storage space (a little inconvenient) and the paint and extra lumber and junk under the basement stairs.



The big piece is the treadmill. We originally were planning on getting something cheap for a couple hundred bucks but very quickly realized that a manual treadmill would not be suitable for us. We ended up getting a low end treadmill that was fairly well rated. It was around $600, so it wasn't a rash purchase, but we rationalized that without paying for a gym membership, the treadmill will pay for itself in a year or so. It definitely has gotten good use when the weather doesn't cooperate!

We have a cheap Bell trainer for our bikes that we use in inclimate weather. Mike is currently training for a triathlon (where he is doing the 25 mi. portion) so he has been using the trainer a lot.



The room was already equipped with this shelving unit, which I just slapped a couple coats of paint on. It holds some equipment for our gym but is pretty empty right now. I’m sure we will find ways to fill it up.



The final room in our basement is a catch-all for crap. We throw boxes down here when we want to make sure an item works, extras of anything, items that need to be donated, and the recycling.



It’s a kind of a scary fire hazard down here. That’s why it is one of my goals this summer to get this room cleared out.



One day this room will hopefully be a home theater. We have some work to do, huh?

This wraps up our current house tour. Check out the rest here:

The Living Room
The Dining Room and Kitchen
The Upstairs

You'll also find an updated House Tour Page at the top of the blog for future reference. As things change, I plan to update that page as opposed to these posts.