It’s been so long since I’ve talked about the basement, you probably forgot we had one.  One very ugly finished basement with suede painted walls in a color that resembled… ok, I won’t go there.. but you can catch up here.

The spare room in the basement has been finished for a few weeks. HHH (headless husband Howard) was ultimately convinced that framing in a new closet to hide the support column and adding extra storage would be a decent idea. The floors are Vermont Maple by Pergo XP. The wall and trim color is Pale Celery and Cotton Balls by Benjamin Moore. Pale Celery is a brave color for us and was something we chose without even buying a sample first. Crazy town. I may have started to sweat a bit when I first saw the color go on. But, I’m coping.

We don’t actively use this room but find it’s convenient to dump suitcases, golf clubs, guitar cases, my sewing machine, etc. in the room. So the closet was built to hide these items and make the room more functional for the rare times we have a full house. I’m also hoping it helps with resale at some time down the line.  While it can’t legally be called a bedroom in Massachusetts since it doesn’t have a direct door or window leading outside, it is a bonus room.  And it already existed.  Just without the closet and with one big metal pole in the room.

HHH went all fancy with the trim molding and I’m so happy he did.  After installing new baseboard covers, the added trim height matches perfectly.

Coco the cat was so happy, she did her favorite roll on the basement floor move.

Then it was time to tackle the main media slash gym room.  The rug had long ago been ripped out. And we had been living in a transitional state with a working treadmill for months. Obviously, this room doesn’t get used much.

One of the items that set us back was that the floor had to be leveled. HHH went all engineer on the space and even sketched out contour lines. If you look closely you can see them in the chaos photo above.

The bottom of our stair case was pretty ratty without finished trim. Someone had slapped white paint on the exposed column and put a 2 x 4 in for a railing. Classy.  So we knocked it out and talked for hours, maybe days, about how to trim out the stairs. During this time, HHH added additional supports to the back of the stairs since they had too much bounce.

Our end solution was to come up with a little wall that we’ll add trim too at the end. I didn’t want to extend the wall and create a collision point at the bottom of the stairs.  Plus, the cat really loves her shortcut when she follows me to the laundry room.

We are finding the wall has a great added bonus of acting as a bar area during construction. Espresso anyone?

HHH continued to lay the flooring over the weekend.  We are installing a floating floor to allow for expansion and contraction since it’s a basement. And using a dimple mat is key. Our basement area is really dry but in the event moisture does find its way in, the dimple mat will keep allow air to circulate and moisture to evaporate. The trouble with the dimple mat is that it increases the noise level.  So first we laid landscaping material which significantly reduces the noise that would otherwise result from the plastic dimple board against the concrete floor.

The floor is about 40 percent done as of today.

Oh, and the walls were painted Behr’s Mourning Dove. The paint for this room was a bit of a debacle. I wanted something light in color but grey was just not working.  HHH insists on keeping his bachelor-pad leather couch. I hate it.  But, since he’s doing all the work, and I have my beastly treadmill in the room, I decided to compromise.  The paint had to work with the leather couch. We sampled three Benjamin Moore colors and two of them didn’t even look like the sample card. Benjamin Moore is more money than any other paint, and it’s a basement… so we went back to Behr and are happy to keep the cash in our pockets to spend on throw pillows.  Or a big manly flat screen…

This room is going to have a more modern look than the rest of our house which I’m excited about. I already bought the rug which is something completely nontraditional. And I’m really excited to find those throw pillows to match. I’m not-so-secretly hoping that a dozen large throw pillows will hide the couch!