Always, Katie: Basement on a Budget: Intro, Rationale, Plans

Pages



Monday, June 12, 2017

Basement on a Budget: Intro, Rationale, Plans

Our kids currently share a nursery, for tons of reasons... including the reason that we only had one bedroom open to stick them in when they were born ;-) Their nurse practitioner warned us at their 18 month well-child appointments that they'd probably start climbing and that they'd most likely be climbing out of their cribs by 3.

We had decided that when we moved them into toddler beds, we wanted to give them their own rooms, too. The problem is: we have four bedrooms upstairs, but they're all currently full. There's the master suite (and I'm not moving out of it!), the current nursery, a guest room, and my craft room (that kind of resembles a Michael's store that's been hit by a tornado). 

The plan is for one twin to stay in what is now the nursery, and for the other to move into the current guest room. But then that leaves the guest room furniture without a home.


We don't entertain overnight guests all THAT often, but it's nice to know it's an option. So we're going to move the guest room across the hall to the smallest of the bedrooms... the one that my craft stuff is currently filling to the brim. :-)

Welllll... that explosion of crafty goodness has to go SOMEwhere! So we turned our attention to our unfinished basement. When we bought the house, the previous owners had started to finish it. so we have a gorgeous, mostly finished bathroom down there, and a little bit of framing, a cable drop, and a fireplace. Because of course. :-) My original vision was to make a little guest apartment/game and TV area down there, with one of the framed-in rooms becoming the guest bedroom and putting a little kitchenette in another little part, then have the biggest framed-in room as a storage room with doors to hide the stuff. But then as Ethan and I are talking through this and walking around our basement daydreaming, we kept coming back to the fact that we just... don't have that many guests! Can we justify a whole mini apartment for the off chance that somebody will want to spend the night once a year or so? DUH! 


So he starts talking about putting my craft room down there, in what was going to be the bedroom. Our basement is a walk-out, so there are windows and a door on one side, with two of those windows in what we were assuming would be the storage room. Seems like a waste of good daylight, and the stuff we're storing in there now doesn't even take up half of the available space, so we decided on this final plan: the basement will have a storage room (in the windowless but framed-in "bedroom"); a little nook with our big freezer, a mini-fridge, some cabinets, and a table for playing games or eating snacks; a sitting area with a TV mounted above the fireplace; my craft room/studio/office with a surprising amount of natural light; and lots of open space for the kids to be kids. :-)

I am BRIMMING OVER with excitement about this project, and I plan to take y'all with me through the whole shebang! We're trying to be very thrifty about the whole thing, without compromising quality, and I have some fun ideas about how to do that that I'm looking forward to sharing. We'll talk finishing, basement-friendly floor coverings, paint swatches, picking palettes, inspiration/mood boards, DIY projects, decor, and clever shopping. Hopefully I'll encounter some great companies along the way that I can tell you all about, too. Yay!

YAYY!!!


Sneak peek: This is the tentative palette I plan to use for my craft room. :-) I picked some Sherwin Williams paint chips up at Lowe's, and have been keeping them handy for motivation and inspiration. And then I made a collage of the same colors using their website and picstitch so I can have my palette at my fingertips on my phone. :-) It feels so bright and cheerful and will allow me to incorporate a few decorative items I've already picked up (because I have weak impulse control when it comes to pink pineapples, apparently). :-) I think that surrounded by lots of white, these happy colors, and inspirational craft supplies, my creative juices will overflow! Yay!


No comments :

Post a Comment

Blog Design by Get Polished