Basement Update

Our winter break project was to replace the carpet in our finished basement. We decided to replace the main living space, half bath, and laundry room with laminate. Our garage door is off of our basement so a lot of dirt/grass gets tracked in. I really wanted a solid surface for ease of cleaning. We want to use this as another living space or potentially a future playroom. It looks kind of blank right now except for cat stuff and exercise equipment, but we'll get there!

I kind of forgot to take before pictures until after we had started ripping out carpet so a lot of these are more like 'during' pictures. We changed out a few lights, replaced smoke detectors, updated the electrical outlets and switches, and painted too.

I did find this picture from a friend's album that showed her dog on our treadmill haha. You can see the blue carpet under the treadmill. Nothing exciting.

More 'during' pictures. You can see the laminate and Quiet Walk in the corner, ready to get put down! We'd also started edging at this point. We painted the main room, hall, and half bath a greige color (Revere Pewter - Benjamin Moore). We wanted to keep things pretty neutral.

Here are some after shots. I took pictures at a bad time of the day so the brightness from the windows was hard to work around. We purchased our laminate from Lumber Liquidators and the color was a light mahogany.

Well at least this shows the color of the floor!

This is the half bath off of the hallway. We need to update the pull string light at some point. We left everything else. The mirror, toilet, and pedestal were in good shape.

For some odd reason this was the way the builders decided to utilize the storage under the stairs. Weird.

After!

In the before pictures you could see exposed pipes that were tacked to the baseboard. I think this bathroom was added at a later point. We found some white moulding that fit over top of the piping. That way it will still be pretty easy to access if we ever need to get to the pipes.

I got my mother-in-law to sew some curtains for behind the toilet. I found this martini fabric on Etsy and they do a good job of concealing the gigantic hole behind the toilet.

Here's another before looking down the hallway. The half bath is on the door to the left and straight forward is my laundry room.

Here was our before of our laundry room. I had started to call to get quotes to see if we could get drywall put up over the concrete walls and to conceal all of the piping. This room is a pretty tight space and our washer and dryer just fit. I was afraid that adding drywall was going to make the room too small. I also realized this was going to be more money than I felt like putting into a laundry room by hiring a contractor.

After. I figured this was a good place to let a little color show :) That's a dog proof litterbox on the rug in case you were wondering what that box was haha.

I decided to put some $9.99 curtains from Target up with a tension rod to hide all of the piping. I added a decal and painted the exposed concrete walls. We've never had water issues so our local Lowes recommended we used DryLok Fast Plug to fill any large holes and we primed with a concrete filler/primer. I think it was Olympic brand. The paint color was Jalapeno Jelly (Valspar).

Looking back down the hallway. My dog is being a photobomber around the corner.

My husband thought this would be a good accessory to slap every time we walked down to the basement :) You can see the color difference in this picture too.

I also decided to replace our lights beside the door today. This is the only picture I could find of the outside of our home. This was our "We just bought a house!" picture.

Here are the new lights and you can also see our new screen door that we added last Fall as well. Another shih tzu photo bomb for ya.

Thanks for looking!