Basement Update

Hello all! I know I'm a bit late but I hope all the women had a wonderful Mother's Day. My husband and kids were so good to me. I was a bit sad to have it end! Anyway, I recently finished a couple projects in our basement that I wanted to share.


When I spilled the can of primer in our basement bathroom I dented the can badly enough that the lid will no longer stay on tight. As a makeshift solution, I had to place a couple heavier cans of paint on top to try to "seal" it. I was worried if I waited too long to use it, the paint would dry up and be unusable. Since I wanted to eventually paint the trim in the basement, but had been putting it off, I decided this was a good excuse just to get 'er done.
However, as most of you know, a lot of times one project leads to another and my painting-the-trim project turned into a much larger one. I'll explain in a bit.

Lets first look at the room before. It's a fairly large room that we've sectioned into two areas. On the left, when entering the room, (the first photo below) is the family/TV/sitting area.

To the right, in the photos below, is the play area. As I was painting the trim, I realized I hadn't taken a before picture in this area. So that is why the trim is half white, half brown. Also, I'm still working on those toy cubbies. I plan to build a few more sections and paint them with something more than primer.

A couple different angles of the play area.

Positives:

• fairly large
• nice lighting (love how much light our sliding doors bring into the room)

Negatives:

• lack of good toy storage 
• dreaded shelf along the two walls that serves no function except to collect dust.

Here is how my to-do list of the room evolved:

I was first only going to paint the trim. But I knew I wanted to repaint the walls eventually. Since it's much easier to paint the trim without needing to cut in (also Sherwin Williams was having their 40% off paint sale), I decided we should just paint the walls while we were at it.

I also wanted to try to improve on the odd ledge/shelf thing if possible.

We really don't have a lot of extra money to be pouring into my projects so I really wanted to do this makeover for as little money as possible.

Here is a sneak peak of the "after". Please ignore my beat up coffee table, (I'll be working on that soon too).

Since the basement is still a work in progress, I decided to divide my updates over a few posts. I'll talk more about the board and batten in my next post and show you a couple more pictures of the room. Stay tuned.