Category: DIY Projects (Page 2 of 5)

We are enjoying our basement! Megan has moved down to her new room, and we’ve already had visitors stay in our “guest room”/Cole’s room. -No, it’s not finished, but it’s usable space, and now we can work on things a little at a time. I thought I would show you some pictures of how it looks now.

When you come down the stairs, the first room on the right is Megan’s new room, or the BLUE room.

She chose the paint color herself, and the bedspread came from our kind neighbor, who said, “Hey, I think we have a bedspread in that color.” Thanks!

No window treatments, yet, but I’m sure we’ll get to that soon. Because the furnace closet is in her room, we decided to just make that wall even and put in two closets. She LOVES having a whole closet just for her art stuff.

I do not know what’s up with that can collection on the top shelf, but she says she is saving them for “a project.” Whatever.

Here’s the view from the other side of the room, where you can see her desk and dresser.

*****

Around the corner is the bathroom.
I love how it’s happy and yellow and sunny. I bought that light fixture a few years ago when we first started on the basement, and I’m glad we could still use it. Because of the florescent lights in there, I can’t get a good picture that doesn’t make the walls look green, but know that they are indeed yellow.

Of course, if you look to the right of the toilet, you will see one of those unfinished areas. Yes, there is a tub, but it’s not working. No shower, no tile. Sorry, kids, you’ll still have to shower upstairs. Oh, and since it’s not working, it seems to have some junk in it.

Now that we have a toilet paper holder and a towel rack, it really feels like a bathroom.

Down the hall from the bathroom you come to the kitchen area. Only it’s not a kitchen yet, it’s a nice area with lots of tile.

We bought some folding tables and chairs for upcoming parties, and just moved the Foosball table out to the kitchen area. Someday that will be a nice island there under the funky blue lights. For now, it’s a game table, which is ALMOST the same thing, right?

From the kitchen, you can go into the bedroom on the right. This is Cole’s room, although Cole is not here to live in it. He’ll be here for about 3 weeks after school is out and before he leaves on his mission, and I hope he enjoys this nice new room. If you look in the closet, you’ll see a few items for the missionary, and nothing else.

The bed, while not here in time for our first visitors, is now set up and I love it. You can also see a little bit of that blue vanity/dresser that I painted a while back. That piece has been hiding out in my bedroom and I filled it up with leftover Christmas things, etc. I brought it down to the basement wondering if it would go with Megan’s room, and realized it looks pretty good in Cole’s room, instead.

On the other side of the kitchen is the new family room.

I moved the big overstuffed couches from the front room upstairs (and by I, I don’t just mean I. I definitely needed help moving those things down the stairs) and they fit nicely in a basement. I bought three packages of these curtains on clearance, and was so excited about how well they matched, and then discovered that each package was only one panel. Of course, when I went back to the store to get more, they didn’t have any more of that specific curtain, but I did find them online, but not for the same great price. Oh, well. This pillow was my “inspiration piece” for the family room. I wanted that yellow, beige and purple and green together.

We also have some bean bag chairs on the floor. Comfy, comfy.

On the other side of the room we have a treadmill. I don’t like it there, but I don’t know where else to put it, so there it sits.

There’s no tv, no entertainment center, no screen, not anything on the walls or decorations anywhere, so it still looks a bit unfinished and not really lived in, but those things will come. For now, I’m thrilled to have the finished space. It’s nice to have Megan into her own room, and we will gradually get those other things finished so that it feels like home, and someplace the kids want to hang out. We’ll be having two get togethers this weekend, so we’ll surely use the space!

I have been trying to get some decent pictures of the basement to show what we have been doing. But honestly, my pictures haven’t turned out great. Plus, sometimes the progress is so slow, it doesn’t seem like there’s much change. In the past couple of weeks we have done a lot of painting, and are happy to say we’ve finished that part, except some touch ups, of course.

Can you tell what’s happening here?

Well, we had some of these can light rings to paint, and realized that the ones in the upstairs were looking dingy, as well. So, Ryan took down all the can lights (bulbs and rings), and cleaned them all

And then he painted them all white, so they would stay white.

Megan and Larissa were very helpful, put almost all of the lights back in, and attached the rings.

PAINT

It’s hard to get a good shot of a paint color when we are talking about a basement. Depending on how much light there is and if I use a flash, the color doesn’t look right in the picture. Lets just say that the outside wall of the family room/kitchen combo is this lovely yellow.

Progress is messy.

But this pictures shows the other walls are a light tan. But depending on the time of day, the opposite walls look more or less yellow. Those cute pendant lights were my idea. There will eventually by an island there, with those lights right over the bar. Right now it just looks like random lights hanging down, but I LOVE them.

I loved that yellow so much, I put it into the bathroom, too.

There’s a picture with the tile I picked out.

Saturday was a busy day for all of us. It was Jenna’s birthday party, and we were busy making and decorating the perfect cake!

She invited a bunch of friends over and we took them all to see Wreck it, Ralph. We needed Megan to drive so that we could get all those girls to the movie. We took up one whole row. Fun party.

She loved her cake and had a fun time with her friends.

While we were busy partying, Ryan was busy in the basement.

Woo-Hoo! I wish we had three or four Saturdays in a row, because there’s still a lot of tile to do. I offered to help, but Ryan has declined my help. Perhaps he knows I don’t know how to tile and I would just be in the way. But he DID let me help him wire up a light fixture and a plug.
Yeah, I’m helpful that way.

In Megan’s room, my sweet neighbor was over and said, “I think I have bedding that would match that blue,” and sure enough, she had a perfect bedspread that they weren’t using anymore that she just gave us. She also gave us sheets and shams–the whole bundle. WAY COOL! Of course there’s no bed in there, but when the tile is finished, then the carpet can go in, and THEN we can move her down there.

Can you believe it? It’s like we can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel!

We spent all of Christmas break working on the basement, and my mom for one has asked how it’s going. So, for my mom and the other two people who might read here, I’ll include a little bit of an update.

Pictures! Where are the pictures? My camera has stopped communicating with the computer, or maybe it’s the other way around, but I can no longer upload pics from my camera to my computer, which makes it difficult to put them in a blog post.

But thanks to Ryan uploading them to the family website, we DO finally have some pictures and stories from our current home improvement projects. We started painting Megan’s room on a Saturday. We got the girls to help us tape and do some of the edges.

I had let Megan pick her own color, and she went with this bright blue.

When the edges were done, we loaded up our paint stick and I started to roll. It’s my favorite part, when the paint starts to come through the roller and you can finally put some color on the wall.

As soon as I started rolling, there was fuzz from the roller in the paint. What? I picked a bit out, and rolled some more, but more and more and more fuzz was ended up on the wall.
Ack!

The roller, which I had bought about a year ago (but had NEVER been used) was disintegrating all over my wall! Drat.
Well, that was the end of that roller, and it ended up in a heap on the floor, while we went to find another roller as quickly as possible.

We already knew they didn’t carry Black and Decker Paint rollers at Ace Hardware, but hoped Walmart might have a replacement roller. No. So, a trip to the Home Depot was next. Ugh. They didn’t have replacement rollers that fit, so we just bought a whole new paint stick system. While there, I picked out a color for Cole’s room, and Ryan picked up a battery powered paint edger “handy” gadget thing.

Whatever.

But since we have a lot of painting to do, maybe that really will be helpful. Ha.

Once we got home, we loaded up paint in the NEW paintstick thingy, and started rolling away. Ryan loaded up paint in his new edger thingy and started painting the edge of the wall right next to the ceiling. Once he got it started, it wasn’t really all that helpful. When he pulled back on the lever to load up more paint into the syringe thing, it snapped off, and somehow sliced into his finger. Bleeding all over the place, we tried to get him a bandaid and put away that contraption without getting blood everywhere (he actually did drip a drop of blood into the paint, but we got it out quickly with a paper towel).

Not a super successful painting day, if you ask me.

And not just in painting, either. Our friends Sarah and Jacob had spent the night Friday, and were ready to leave on Saturday. They were going to meet their mom in Orem, then they would all drive home to Arizona. They got to the end of our street, and when they slid on the ice a bit, their van just died. Ryan got a phone call asking him to tow them back here, and then their mom later called a tow truck to take the van away, where it was later confirmed that the transmission had finally given up the ghost, and it would be about $2K to get that fixed. Still needing a car to get them home to Arizona, Robin scoured the ads and found an old car on Craig’s list for not too much money. When she went to check it out, she took it for a pre-purchase test drive. While testing, she gunned it, stopped suddenly, took it on the freeway, and tried everything she could to discover any hidden defects. Not finding anything major, she bought the car, only to have it stop and refuse to start about a mile away from where she had bought it. Two truck number two took that one away. Her kids, still at my house, were getting restless, until Robin and Ron finally came and got them later that afternoon. I, however, wasn’t there at the time as I was taking my daughter who had missed the first two day of school in January to the after cares clinic to diagnose and treat a nasty UTI. I tell you, it really was a stellar day.

But that’s just an aside to our story about paint. Ryan and I continued to paint that room until it was blue, blue, blue.

And the girl was happy with the results!

One wall was left unpainted. She wants that wall white and says she’s going to paint a mural on it. We’ll see.

On Monday I did the touch ups for that blue room, and then started on Cole’s room.

Here’s the before shot.

As I started painting the Behr “Garden Wall”, I realized it was far more BROWN and much less GRAY than I wanted. Ugh. Not exactly what I had been going for, and the more I painted, the less I liked the color.

By dinner time, I was getting downright discouraged, and quite tired of painting.

(Sorry that pic is kind of blurry, but it’s the only one that shows a mostly finished wall)

I even tried painting one of the walls green, so see if I liked that combo better. John said, this wall is like a toad (pointing to the brown) and this wall is like a frog (pointing to the green). Thanks, John, but that doesn’t really help.

The next day I went and ran some errands (one of which included returning that stupid power edger to Home Depot), returned some Christmas things, and went to Ross to look for inspiration in the form of a pillow or maybe a bedspread. I found a really cute couple of pillow that are going to help me with my future family room, and a bedspread that I thought would go really well with the BROWN in Cole’s room.

I got that room mostly finished, and just need to do a couple of touch ups.

There’s more going on, but I will leave that for another post. Someday we’ll have some actual “after” pictures, but for now, I’m just thrilled that we are making progress.