Our Unfinished Basement

In the spirit of all this organizing, my sewing room, in the basement, is definitely next on the list. It’s going to be a long, long process though. :)

But before I start showing you my sewing room, I want to show you the basement and what we’ve already done to it. The clean, full basement was definitely a huge selling point, and for us, it’s also definitely a huge testament to what paint can do.

So when we bought the house, the basement was all a sort of pinkish color. Floors, walls, ceiling. Part of the ceiling had really terrible drywall work but most was unfinished.

Here’s our basement when we first moved in.

As basements easily become, it was a catch-all. Eventually we knew we wanted a few defined areas: a tool room, my sewing/craft room, a little living space, and a home office-type space for Brandon.

We opened up a few walls that were down there and also decided to take down the ceiling drywall and paint all the ceilings (the open joists) white, which we had done in a previous house. It’s a lot of work but it keeps the ceilings seeming higher and leaves everything open for access to pipes and plumbing.

We bought a Wagner Paint Crew Plus Spray Painter and also used Grandpa’s trusty Wagner Wide Shot Power Sprayer.

(Update: First we primed with Zinsser FastPrime2 – a water-based primer/sealer to make sure we had good coverage over the old joists – with no bleed-through of stains or tannin.  Then we painted with Conco’s High Hide White in Satin…it was an inexpensive paint we got at Menards that had great coverage and still looks good a few years later!)

Did I say it was messy? We were painted disasters for many many weekends.

But the amazingly bright ceilings were worth it!

Here’s a shot of the ceilings partially done. What a difference.

Here’s a shot of the future living space and sewing room with the ceilings painted (but you can still see the pinkish walls).

We painted all the cinder block a very light gray and we painted the floors with Valspar Oil Gloss Floor Paint in Lake Country.

Isn’t it so much more bright and open? Paint is so amazing.

Here’s our tool room before we got started.

And then after we got our hands on it.

And, to be fair, since these “after” pictures show the basement totally empty (we were painting the floors after all!), here’s a picture of Brandon’s sort of home office/computer workshop.

It’s very “lived” in, we’ll call it. We’re definitely not finished working on the basement. We have lots of plans for peg board and other organizing, but in the meantime we’re so happy with the lightness and brightness.  Speaking of brightness, I forgot to mention that Brandon added a ton of fluorescent fixtures up in between the joists, so they’re not really visible but they give off so much light! We put natural colored bulbs in them so that it’s not too industrial office feeling down there.

I’m not really ready to show you the disaster that is my sewing room yet, but it’s a heap of fabric and crafts just waiting to be organized, and I’m getting started! I will keep you posted along the way.

What about you? I know you have amazing paint stories…or spaces that desperately need to be organized? Tell me tell me!