The Basement

Remember that time I said our first project was to paint the basement and put in a new floor? Well, we got one out of those two things done before something catastrophic happened... But let's back up for a sec.

The basement looked like this when we got the house:

 LOOK AT THAT PANELING. So dark, So 80s. We knew it had to go. The basement definitely had its perks though: it was mostly finished and the drop ceiling definitely helped to take away some of that basement-y feel. It had a washer and dryer and it had a bathroom, and tons of room for storage. And all of the utilities were nicely tucked away in another room or behind nifty little built in closets that some previous home owner had built. But it also had its cons: washer and dryer were on opposite sides of the room, ugly miniature (yes, that is a miniature) pool table, weird creepy crawl space in the bathroom, cracked/peeling floor paint...oh, and did I mention paneling? Well we were not discouraged, we had our list and we figured that a fresh coat of white paint and a new floor would make a huge difference.

We bought a few cans of white paint and primer...and then a few more cans once we discovered that the first 2 did not even come close to covering the paneling. Over three days, we painted the whole basement including the bathroom and the windows, and it really looked great! It totally brightened up the space. We used Behr Ultra Pure White in Eggshell Matte (we probably would have gone with a higher gloss next time...which may be soon). Here's the "after" shot:

The basement post painting! So much brighter

Rick multi-tasking on the phone with Verizon while painting

After the 3rd day of painting, there was a crazy monsoon-like rainstorm which knocked everyone's power out. The next day, we came back to put in the beautiful new laminate floors we had just purchased from Lumber Liquidators....only to find that there was an inch of water in our basement.. YAY HOME OWNERSHIP!!!

Stay tuned....