I’ve finally finished the majority of the projects in our basement family room, which included the extensive painting of the panelling! There are a couple of small things that need to still be done (ahem Husband!), but they don’t really involve much mess or a long amount of time. Let me show you a tour of our cozy space :)
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You may remember I shared some in-progress photos way back in the spring. My plan was to finish all the painting by the end of May… ha ha ha… After sitting relatively untouched for the whole summer, and once we got our garage makeover completed – I hustled hard to get everything done down here!
Final Updates in the Basement
While we painted the fireplace bricks last winter, I never got around to finishing the electrical panel cover.
Our electrical panel is actually recessed into our brick fireplace (I think they built the thing around it!) and the previous homeowners left a plywood cover to hide everything.
I painted it white, picked up a piece of door stop moulding and cut a little frame to fancy it up. I glued/nailed it down, caulked the seams and gave everything another coat of paint.
Now it fits much better with the light and bright theme of our basement, and I was finally able to setup our cuckoo clock (it was in the boxes, just waiting for me to finish everything!). Although, turns out it needs to be wall hung in order for the chains to hang down and actually work… but it will do just nicely here until it finds a more permanent home :)
Our “entertainment” units were also left sort of unfinished too – and if you remember, there used to be a frame around this cut-out way back when. I wanted to streamline the shape, so I cut those little indents at the top so that it would be a proper rectangle (even though the Xbox did fit perfectly…)
I used another piece of the same doorstop and cut a frame to fit the perimeter. Again, everything was nailed in, caulked and painted – so now it looks like a proper built in!
The biggest (although probably unnoticeable change) was that I finished all the painting on the living room side of our basement. This took the longest amount of time because it involved moving all the furniture over, making sure all the seams were caulked, painting a few coats of white, then doing a coat of a solvent-based primer to cover the bleed-through, then a final coat of the proper white.
While I did do most of the caulking portion in the summer, I was left with a lot of painting the last couple of weeks! If you caught our home tour video, you may have noticed that the edges of the paint weren’t sharp (like in the photo above), but now I fixed all of that :)
Basement Family Room Tour
And now we have a pretty-much completed family room! (The office portion was done in the spring, thank goodness I didn’t have to worry about moving our heavy desks around!).
With the addition of some nice bamboo blinds and these final updates, our basement no longer looks like a mid-renovation zone.
We moved the baby swing to this corner, and it sort of deters our little man from playing with all. the. board. games. on our custom shelf. There are a few that he can’t open, but it seems like he can easily open all of the ones with the smallest and most amount of parts! (Ever have to pick up Monopoly money and houses strewn across the floor!?)
We’ve kept the mantel décor the exact same for a while, but I’m excited to move everything and decorate for Christmas soon! (And yes, changing the light fixture is one of the Husband’s tasks…)
Right now, we still have our baby play mat in front of the fireplace. Last year, we put it up as a deterrent for going near the flames, but I’m not sure what we’ll do this winter (we haven’t turned it on yet, which is another reason I wanted to get all my painting done asap).
I decided that I like the couches flat against the long wall and having our chair in the other corner. While it’s not the best setup for conversation, it’s the most baby-proof solution since the little mister can’t crawl in the back of the couches with the electrical outlets (the only exposed one in the entire basement is behind the bean bag chair!).
We mostly sit on the couch on the right (it’s directly in line with the television) so the blue sofa slipcover hasn’t held up as nicely as the other one. Our new metal and wood coffee table is setup in its final location, and the mister can usually be found climbing all over it and moving the coasters around the room…
We get a lot of good daytime light down here thanks to the Husband’s office side window (we keep those blinds open almost 90% of the time).
In the opposite view, we have our most used area – the TV and games shelf! We used to have the basket sitting in the middle of the shelf, but it was full of our games controllers and we didn’t want the mister playing with those. He loves going in his baskets (#2 and 3) and will surprisingly leave almost everything else alone (he has opened the other ones a few times, but we usually try and deter him from that).
Finally, the last update I did down here was painting the pole black (which I actually did in the summer when I did my patio furniture makeover). We built a different cap on the top (the previous one was broken anyways) but I will have to find a way to secure the pole better, since I literally just knocked it out of its position when we were playing…
What’s Left to Do?
Eventually, we’d like to get new carpets installed (which will hide all the gaps you see along the baseboards in the photo above) and paint the ceiling a true white. We have a few white electrical switch plates to add (I want the Husband to do a teeny bit of electrical work to remove some switches) and I think that’s all the major stuff! (And the light fixture too).
Our laundry room door also sticks, so either replacing it (or shaving it down and painting it white) would be nice. Oh – and I just need to pickup an L-bracket to secure the TV shelf to the wall so it doesn’t fall down while our monkey climbs all over it…
While the terms “living room” and “family room” can be used interchangeably, I like to think of this area as our basement family room, because it just seems so much cozier right!? We spend the majority of our time down here now (which is the complete opposite of when it used to be dark and more country-themed).
Now we hardly ever use the couches anymore in our upstairs living room (although technically Tootsie is on them all the time!).
And I just had to include another picture of our little monkey playing in the TV area :)
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