More house-painting... the bonus room is done!

More house-painting... the bonus room is done!

• 2.06.2013

This one came out of nowhere; the basement bonus room was not high on my list of priorities for rooms to finish in the house. But I'm so happy with how it turned out, with just a few updates that fell into our laps!

One of the major selling points of our house was the bonus room on the ground floor/basement, first place you see coming in from the garage. It's perfect for the husband's game room/TV room--that's right, there is NO TV on the main floor or top floor! The only TV we have is the monstrosity in the basement, and it almost looks okay sitting on the shiny white Ikea entertainment unit I totally scored on Craigslist.

But the space is kind of a cave, and we didn't want it to be too boring or dark or full of junk. It's not ever going to be super glam, but it could be cozy, and fun.

So here's the before (after prep work for painting, sorry...):

And the after!...

I'd been collecting pieces to make it more interesting and fun, and really like the entertainment unit and couch, also Ikea via Craigslist. We found the rug at West Elm a few weeks ago for an amazing deal, since it was a floor model and an extra percent off for this-and-that. But the breakthrough came when my friend suggested we paint the upper half of the wall. It has a small, un-useful ledge on the middle half of the wall since the bottom part is the concrete foundation. Why not play with it, right?, and make it an interesting color?

It was pretty much the easiest painting job ever, since it's a small, rectangular wall... just had to tape it and remove two switch plates. Took like an hour or something for each coat. ;) And we already had the lovely grey paint, from the same card as the very, very light grey of the rest of the walls, from the stripes I painted in the upstairs guest bathroom. Anyway, here it is!

More Ikea-via-Craiglist: the chair ($40) and the Malm dresser--free, and pretty boring and not great for the space, but, it stores cords and husband's junk drawer, which I recently had way too much fun organizing with Dollar Tree organizers.

Ta-da!!

All done, and a fun space for me to be in and walk through every day, and a great place for my husband to play video games (and play with his K'Nex and Koosh basketball hoop, as you can see... his mom cleaned out her garage when we bought the house ;)). The ATAT wall decal is another brand new addition; husband was extremely excited to order it on Amazon, and it looks pretty good on the new grey wall!

We also just hung up the guitars--they also fit nicely on that little half-wall space. I love those guitar hanger hook things, but he's been hesitant to hang his guitars since he thinks they aren't nice enough to display. I think, hey, it gets them off the floor and reminds us of your musical abilities every time I look at them! Win-win! We have a couple more that I want to hang someday, for some other, even less-used guitars.

Another extremely exciting update is this super cool motion sensor, timed, dimmer light switch. The room was in desperate need of a two-way switch for in the mornings when it's dark in the stairwell behind you, on your way to the garage, but dark in the room so you had to leave the stair light on, then cross the room after opening the garage door and garage light, all while carrying purse, coat, lunch bag, and travel mug... aaack!! So we installed this fancy motion sensor one that turns off after a minute or whatever time you set it to. And it's on a dimmer so it doesn't have to blind you first thing in the morning. Amazing improvement!