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.

House Progress: The Upstairs

 It’s been awhile since I've shared with you all some pictures of the house. I gave a tour of the house before we moved in, but haven't quite finished with the current tour of our house. Please stay with me, I have plans to get the rest of it out soon!



Coming up the stairs and to the left is my craft room. Above is how it was before we moved in, staged and uncluttered. Now it’s a mess and needs organizing. Last year, I picked up my childhood things from my bedroom at my parents’ house. It all rests in the craft room. The sad thing is that there still boxes and boxes of stuff in my parents’ attic that I need to bring back. It would be nice to paint this room (and the hallway), but I am not confident that this will get done while we live here. White is pretty inoffensive and is kind of nice to have for an open, airy space.



When we moved in, there was great debate where everything should go. We had two rooms to put a craft area and office into. One of us could take the spare bedroom, but would have to share it with the second guest bed. The other person would use the loft area, which only has three walls. Michael chose the spare bedroom and it was a good decision at first because it could contain noise a little better than the loft. You see, he occasionally plays games on his computer and at night if I’m trying to sleep, it can be noisy.



The spare room was originally how it is above. Bright blue walls, a neon floral wallpaper, and circus colored curtains (you can kind of see them on the left). I removed the wallpaper and curtains and painted it a light gray.



Then we decided to move the office downstairs because there was plenty of room down there and eventually we would need to move it anyway (assuming a baby enters our lives at some point). That turned out to be a great decision for the downstairs but it left the bedroom upstairs kind of empty. Now that the chicks have left the room, we need to do some work on it. Some things I would like are: a dresser, some art for the walls, a new light fixture or a redo on the ceiling fan?





Down the hall a little bit is the bathroom. It’s the only full bathroom in the house. When we moved in it was sponge painted with blue and white stripes and had a wallpaper border. There was a whole lot of pattern going on in there. I really wanted a green bathroom. I’m not so sure why. I ended up going with something that matched the tile and linoleum flooring better.



It’s Olympic’s Tattered Sail and it’s a really nice creamy color that complements all of the white in the bathroom perfectly. We installed a shower head and a new medicine cabinet and light fixtures, replaced all of the hardware, and painted the vanity. It’s definitely more relaxing in there now. And I'm thrilled I don’t have to go down to the basement to shower.



The master bedroom at the end of the hall needed a little sprucing up, what with the outdated stenciled border and the super old curtains.



I painted the walls the same gray as the spare room and it looks completely different in this room. It’s definitely more blue than I thought it would be. I made the shams and curtains at our last house and simply moved them with us to this house. We upgraded to matching lamps from Ikea which was definitely needed in this house. I'll go into more detail later, but our bedroom doesn't have a light attached to the ceiling fan. There is just a single bulb that sticks out from the wall.

So that’s the upstairs! We're pretty happy with the way things are on this floor for now. Especially since there is so much to do on the main floor. Stay tuned for a look at the basement next week.