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Home Improvement–from Dungeon to Mo’ Bettah!
Monday, July 16th, 2012In addition to being busy with stuff, errands, making step-outs for a demo-lecture and whatnot, I took some time to spruce up the basement. Long time readers may (dimly) recall that I posted when we moved in early in 2011 about the unfortunate colors and finish (or lack thereof) in the basement.
When you go down the steps from the main level (there is just an unfinished attic, ground floor, and basement in this house), you enter a “room” with several smaller spaces walled off on three sides of the “center” area. One currently serves as storage, one for the utilities (water heater, water pump, water filter, furnace, heating oil tank, electric panel), one is a sort of storage and workroom (the previous owner kept tools and building stuff in here), a wood room which stores a winter’s worth of wood to heat the house, and the two rooms that were joined to become one large studio for me (if you put State of the Studio in the search box those posts will turn up).
Here are the “before” photos of the center area:
Shortly after moving in…the dark brown in my studio (beyond the doors) had already been covered by soft cream. The entrance, however, was still an open hole with some raw drywall edges with “roasted pumpkin” paint used in the remainder of the center part of the basement.
And part of the area on the right, with that icky-for-a-basement pumpkin and the large green hot tub. A hot tub in a basement area with NO windows? Getting it out was almost impossible–they must have taken it down before finishing the stairs–it was like popping a cork out a small hole, except the “hole” was the entire staircase up, and required removing door trim etc. to get the extra inch needed to get it out without cutting it into parts….
When we moved in and worked on my studio, I had the painter also spray primer/white on the ceiling of the center area, making it much less gloomy. Last summer, our builder added the doors to my studio, and baseboard and door trim to all the doors to those little rooms. I then painted over the pumpkin in August of last year with a lovely sky blue.
Doors to my studio installed
Ceiling primed…that big foam hot tub and pumpkin. Bleah. Really NOT my colors!
Blue walls…seriously better than pumpkin! Eventually I got rid of the last of the pumpkin (on the stairs up–on the right where you see the broom), using a lovely sunny yellow and repainted the stairs’ ceiling from dingy gray-white to warm “Gardenia” white
This summer’s chore: paint all the pre-primed trim and the floor, in the same wonderful grass green as my studio!
Pre-primed trim installed, and have just “cut in” the green at the edges of the floor. As you can see, the cement was ugly, splotchy and just …well…. UGH.
The first coat of green—minus my escape route to the stairs–is down. You can see (maybe?) in the photo that when wet it is fairly transparent… I ended up putting down four coats of Floor Paint.
Drum roll, please:
Is that better or what??? Hot tub GONE. Trim on all the doors and at the bottom of the stairs. Ceiling primed/white. Walls sky blue (not pumpkin). Stair walls warm sunshine. Floor green (not grungy cement). BETTER!
I tell you, even with just the first coat on it made so much difference to go down through a fairly nice space to get to the studio–it felt for a while like I was going down to my dungeon! Now the route is lovely. And the chair? Hubby likes to read and snooze by the fire in winter. And the other day, when it was hot and muggy (and we have no air conditioning), he was down there reading in the COOL of the basement!
Yippee! Summer painting chores reduced by a lot! Still want to do the inside of the closet where the washer/dryer are and the kitchen (which has so little wall space I will probably be able to cover it all with just a quart of paint!
Next: off to Boston to retrieve No. 2 son from wrestling camp, then home!
