Finished Basement Theater Room Reveal

This room has been a work in progress for about 1.5 years.  When we bought our house, the basement was unfinished and we just threw all our crap down there.

In July of 2011, when I was 8 months pregnant, we had a bad storm and our basement flooded.  We had about a foot of water and we lost a lot of old memories and things we saved.  After the flood, we learned our lesson about storing things in cardboard boxes and we invested in some heavy duty shelves and totes.

The shelves were the beginning of our new finished basement design and we slowly started working on it.  I am very proud to say that my husband completed this whole job by himself over about 18 months.  It was a LOT of hard work and I tried to help as much as I could (or help by babysitting Connor) while he was working. 

Here are the stairs before we started.

The basic plan was to have the heavy duty shelves on the side and then create an L-shaped storage area that circled around to the back of the room.  The storage area would hold the random crap, the storage totes, furnace, electrical box, and other various things that could be hidden.  The rest of the room was converted into a theater room/man cave/play area for us to enjoy.  The technology and the electronic aspects were designed by the husband and then I chose most of the decorations, colors, furniture, etc.

So after 18 months of hard work, I present to you the new finished basement!

I asked for some small cubbies in the stairway for extra storage and I love how they turned out.

Walk down the stairs and this is what you see...

I'm not usually a fan of leather furniture, but I felt it was the best choice with a toddler and a husband who likes to snack.  The patterned pillows I made make it a little softer and more warm.

The husband requested that we hang some manly theater-type art, so I searched for awhile until I found these theater art pieces from Hobby Lobby.

The screen was my husband's special project.  We have a projector hanging from the ceiling that projects onto the 95 inch screen.  The screen is painted on the wall using a special paint called Silver Screen which is supposed to be the perfect hue for a screen on the wall.  The cabinet was another difficult purchase as we had to find something that fit perfectly in the space and would hold all the equipment.  By making a few alterations to the cabinet once we got it home, we were able to make it work in the room.

The door to the left of the screen is for a little room that holds the sump pump and back-up emergency sump pump.  Hopefully, we will never have to deal with a flood again!

This area isn't as pretty, but it's the computer/gaming area for the husband.  I added my touch with a few baby photos to remind him who's upstairs while he plays!

Here's a better view of the projector on the ceiling and the surround speakers on the walls.

It's pretty amazing to see how this room was transformed in a short time and was all done by us!  From this mess...


...to this amazing room!

Baby's Nursery Reveal!

The baby boy nursery is finally done! It's been such a fun experience to renovate the room and come up with crafts to personalize the space. Hubby and I spent so much time this summer trying to make it perfect for our little boy.

(See the list at the bottom of the post for tutorial links and where I bought things)First, let's go back to the room before when it was just for storage and random crap...
The nasty mirrored closet doors and icky 80's blue blinds are horrible!
Old ugly trim and doors...and Kitty taking a look!
To this little baby haven!

So let's start out at the door with the new 6-panel door and updated white trim. We painted the room in light yellow with a blue border around the top.

I couldn't resist this cute door hanger for 50 cents from the thrift store

We bought white wood blinds with a valance for the windows. Curtains are just too much of a mess with a hairy cat! The white dresser will have the changing pad on top and we can look out the window as we change diapers.

The white wall shelves in the corner are perfect for showing off future baby photos, heirloom books, etc. The lip on the edge is great so nothing falls off. The frames were thrift store purchases that I painted to match.
(See the sock monkey and crayon frame tutorials at the bottom of the post.)

Ah, the glider. Sadly, this glider decision stressed me out more than anything! I had the hardest time picking one that was comfortable, cheap, and matched the room. After hours spent at baby stores, I took a risk and ordered this one online. Who knew it would match perfectly? We love it and it was a lot cheaper than those baby store gliders.

The lamp was also another struggle. Of course, I needed white to match, but it's pretty hard to find a white floor lamp. After some searching, I found one, but it came with a pink lampshade. I figured it would be super easy to find a blue or red lampshade to replace it with. I was wrong! Apparently, colored lampshades are harder to find than I thought! I gave in and decided to cover a white one in fabric...until I put the white one on and realized I just liked it plain white!

The wall letters were a fun project that Hubby and I worked on together. It's a little twist to the normal wall letters because we hung them on drawer knobs.

I love the bedding we picked! I never would have thought this would be my choice, but I got really into all the preppy boy stuff I saw in the stores. I love that it's not super masculine, but it's still cute and really soft. It's been fun to be able to make pillows to go with it also. The embroidered C pillow and the patchwork one pictured above were some of my fun crafts from the summer.

Did you happen to catch the old light that used to be here? It looked almost like a spotlight and the lightbulbs made the color in the room horrible. I picked out a white fan to replace it.

So maybe we're bad parents, but yes, we have a tv in there. I admit to being a tv addict, so Hubby convinced me that we would want one in there if I'm going to be spending a lot of time nursing and sitting in the glider. We plan on taking it out later when the baby knows what it is.

Wall art was really hard to find because we don't really have a theme in the room. I saw these pieces and I knew they would match perfectly!

After our baby shower, I realized we would probably need somewhere to store books and toys. We found this small shelf set and bought some canvas storage cubes to hold toys.

Remember those nasty mirrored closet doors? Now we have 6-panel white doors to match all the doors in the house.

Nothing too exciting in the closet, but there's lots of room for baby stuff! We got very lucky that our house had Elfa already in the bedroom closets when we moved in!

And our growing collection of baby clothes...

So there it is! We're so excited to have it done and ready for baby to come home to!

Shopping List:
Yellow paint - Behr Pale Honey
Blue paint - Behr French Court
Baby furniture - Babies R Us Baby Cache collection
Glider & ottoman - Target Danielle glider & ottoman
Floor lamp - Target (comes with a pink gingham shade that we changed)
Bedding - Babies R Us Bacati Boys Stripes & Plaids
White storage shelf & colored storage cubes - Target
Wood Wall letters - Joanns
Framed wall art - Hobby Lobby

Tutorials:
Crayon Name Frame
Patchwork Pillow
Embroidered Initial Pillow
Sock Monkey
Wall letters - coming soon!

Hall Light Makeover

I've mentioned before that our house is still stuck in the 70's in the rooms we haven't renovated yet. There's also all those little details like door knobs, light switches, sconces, etc that have to be updated. We had enough of our nasty brass hall lights and one of them even cracked when we tried to change a bulb. Seriously, aren't these things nasty?

So we bought 6 new lights for our front hallway, second floor hallways, and master closet. It took me a long time to find something that I really liked. For once, this project went pretty smoothly and we were done in just a couple hours! I'm so happy to have these updated!

Go here to see where I'm linking up today

Easy Lamp Makeover Tutorial

So here's my old lamp that was in my craft room. I don't even know where I got it...I think it was in my grandparents' house, it got passed down to my parents, sat in their basement for 10 years, and then I took it.

Anyway, it's the perfect size for the room, but the ugly off white shade was just not right. I wanted a bright red to match the bedding.


Solution? Spray paint...or so I thought. It did NOT work well and I didn't get the bright red I wanted.


Plan B was to cover the shade in red fabric. First, I wanted to make sure the fabric was ironed. Any wrinkles in the fabric will never be able to be fixed once it's on the shade.


Then I spread the fabric on a flat surface and slowly rolled the shade around the fabric.


I traced the outline of the shade. Yeah, yeah, still using my pen to write on fabric, but I promise I have real fabric pencils now too! It's a bad habit to break!


Then once I had the outline drawn, I enlarged the shape by 1 inch on each edge so there would be extra to wrap around the inside of the shade.


I cut out the fabric and slowly wrapped it around the shade. Using tacky glue, I wrapped the edges of the fabric to the inside of the shade and glued. It worked best to only do a few inches at a time.


After each section, I let the glue dry. If it works better, use paper clips or binder clips to keep the fabric from moving while it dries.


When the shade was completely wrapped, I folded over the edge to give the overlapped area a finished look. Then I glued the edge closed.


And here's my finished lamp!
It was super easy, took less than an hour, and only cost me a couple bucks for the fabric!


The red fabric could not match any better!