All the space

You guys, the basement is DONE! We have moved in! It feels like the available space in our house has almost doubled!

The official last day of work was Nov. 2, when our contractor (whom we LOVE) Scott of Nailed It Improvement came and hung the doors I had stained in the doorways to the storage closet and boiler room, put the door knobs and door pulls on all the doors, and his assistant went around doing touch up paint. It was weird saying goodbye, like we should have a grand finale moment when confetti and balloons fall out of the ceiling (but the ceiling is only 6’4”) and all our friends and family show up and congratulate us on how good it looks. The truth is that the place had looked mostly-done for over a month and was waiting for Josh and I to finish the doors that we had found in our attic, so the final day was not a “grand reveal.” But getting those last touches completed meant we could finally clean out all the tools and extra supplies and bring the kids’ stuff down.

We had actually moved the first cubbies down in the middle of October — I was just sick of looking at them in the upstairs study where much of our excess furniture was being stored during the renovations. Oct. 29, we took the couches and TV stand down, knowing that Scott should be coming back any day to hang the last doors. The next day, we brought one more cubby down, and then the next day, another, and that weekend I moved all the toys from the first floor to the downstairs. It makes it look like our kids have a lot of toys, but it also looks very calming because the cubbies aren’t over-stuffed. I’ll also soon see what toys never get moved out of their cubbies, and those shall be disappearing once the new Christmas toys arrive.

On Nov. 5, our new rug pad arrived, which allowed me to move a rug in Rye’s room that I had bought 9 years ago down to the “play” area of the playroom. This rug is 9 feet by 6 feet — an awkward size that wasn’t quite big enough for our living room — and had been relegated to the upstairs right after I bought it. 

But it fit the new playroom space perfectly, and once I convinced Rye to let me have it back (he gets sentimental about a lot of things, like a true packrat), I could move onto buying one more rug for the toy storage area, mostly to keep the kids from ridiculously denting up the floor by the cubbies and provide a softer ground for the other main area I expect they will be playing in. The perfect rug for that area would be 5 by 6 feet, but those don’t exist. At first I bought two rugs that were 3 by 5 feet intending to put them adjacent to each other to make a 5 by 6 rug, and since they were the last two in stock, I wasn’t too worried that they wouldn’t be from the same dye lot. But when they arrived they looked awful together — one was somewhere between maroon and brick and the other was sort of a cayenne red. This photo does not do the color difference justice.

So I had to settle for this 5 by 5 foot rug, which I let Knox help pick out and he’s pretty proud of that. I like it, but I like the way the red one looked like ropes because I’m going for a subtle nautical theme since the sconces look like portholes and you’re in a basement, which is underground and it can feel the same as being underwater. But blue arrows are nice enough.

As for the couch area, we already had the two couches in our possession (read: we didn’t have to buy furniture post-renovation!) and they fit in their prospective spots that I had imagined and only casually measured for. The tan couch was my sister-in-law’s couch, which she had replaced in the spring and I quickly and shamelessly had asked what she would be doing with once her new couch came in. We had to pick it up months before the basement was finished, or really started, and then awkwardly fit it in our first floor living room, but it kind of made the space seem more cozy, even if a little more cramped. Now it’s found its new home. And the leather loveseat we had purchased 9 years ago for our “upstairs study,” the room that is now Knox’s, where the loveseat had a hope chest as its coffee table and then our TV stand that we had bought from IKEA for our first apartment in Reisterstown to hold our secondary TV, which was not connected to cable or the internet, but to our VCR and old DVD player and Josh’s PS2. We might have sat there twice together and watched a movie. So that TV stand was also moved down to the basement, again, saving us a ton of money, though it fits awkwardly and I’m looking for a used corner TV stand, a petite one, everywhere I get a chance. I’ll find the right one sooner or later. Sadly, IKEA doesn’t make a single corner TV stand. I suppose it’s because everyone wall-mounts their TVs now, and you can’t do that on a corner.

My laundry room is delightfully big and bright, but still a little sparse. I want to find a classy way to store my laundry detergent—perhaps in one of those glass lemonade dispensers?—but I have not executed that yet. I’m not sure if I want a floating shelf over the washer and dryer or not. 

Notice my little stool that I use to reach tiny children’s socks stuck to the bottom of my gigantic washer? Knox also likes to stand there and watch through the glass lid at the clothes swishing back and forth at a soapy jamboree. I did purchase my first piece of art in my laundry room, you know, so I have something to look at while I drink wine and fold laundry (that sounds a little dangerous, I better stick to whites only). I had been looking at this painting since summer, and finally pulled the trigger on it two weeks ago. I found it on Etsy and looking at it, I immediately thought “that looks like the Eastern Shore.” And “shore” enough, the artist live in Salisbury and paints a ton of beautiful Maryland landscapes. And she’s the mother of a 3- and a 5-year-old, and calls herself TheNapTimeArtist, so God bless her for getting any paintings done!

I plan to buy more art but don’t want to rush it. I’m also at a weird junction, where I look at a lot of art and think “22-year-old Carrie would have LOVED that.” But 38-year-old Carrie? She’s a little more of a snob. Besides, I’m trying to be less impulsive anyway and make sure I really love something before I buy it. When I see the right art, I’ll know it.

So with the basement renovation, we have gained an extra 600 or so square feet of LIVING space to our basement. Before, it was just storage and a laundry room that looked like you would lure someone there to murder them.

But what’s even MORE exciting, is that we also are gaining back all the space of the second floor bedroom that has been the office/playroom-that-was-never-ever-played-in! That’s the biggest bedroom upstairs (we took the second biggest bedroom as the master because we converted the old 2^nd floor kitchen into a master bath and walk-in-closet — two things we couldn’t achieve in the biggest bedroom) and our plan is to move Knox into that space over the next few months. The room needs to be repainted, so I’m toying with the idea of waiting until Knox is potty trained so that the freshly painted room won’t get stunk up with dirty diaper smell. Knox is 2 and 5 months, and Rye was potty trained at 2 and 7 months. Knox hadn’t been that interested in potty-training, until I told him you get an M&M for every time you use the potty, and then he wanted to try it right away. I think after Christmas I will start putting real effort into this venture.

And then once Knox moves into the big bedroom (Rye is keeping his bedroom, the 3^rd biggest one, because he has about a dozen real road signs mounted to the walls and we’re not moving them), then Knox’s current room, the tiny one over the foyer, will become Josh’s office. For the past year, Josh has been using his desk in the dining room, which is OK for using the computer, but has led to unsightly papers stacking up on both his desk and half our dining table. I will be so happy to have that situation rectified! Plus we will then have access to the attic stairs in that room at all times—right now we’re limited to when Knox is not sleeping in his room.

And we’re working on gaining one MORE extra working space—the back porch room off the dining room! This 5 by 7 foot room was made livable last year when we installed a heater to it (mostly to keep the pipes in the space above, which is the master bathroom, from freezing). Scott had installed the drywall but we told him not to waste his time finishing it off, we would get to it later when he did the basement. But then we filled that room up with a ton of shelves from our basement once the big reno started, and there wasn’t space to keep working on the back porch room. So I asked my dad if he could finish it off, and over the weekend I did the final sanding. I plan to get it primed by Thanksgiving so that my father, the perfectionist, won’t want to do a fifth coat of spackle.

Then Scott will come back and install the base trim and window trim and I can move my desk in! I’m really excited about this, because then I can get my laptop out of the kitchen, I’ll be able to store my school books and papers on my desk out of view, and I can WORK in there while the kids are watching their afternoon video and I can SHUT THE DOOR and have a little peace and quiet! Eventually this room will be a vestibule to a back screened in porch (I’m seriously going to live in this house until I die, everybody), but that’s at least two years away, so until then, it will be mine, all mine. I might paint it a terribly girly color to keep all boys out.

As for how successful the plan is of getting the kids to PLAY in their new playroom, they’re taking to it more and more each day. Often they insist that I go down with them, and I do go down and help establish what game we’ll be playing, then I say “I have to go upstairs and get my coffee” or “let me go check that chicken in the oven” and I just don’t come back until someone is crying. Pretty much every play session ends in crying, or twice it has ended in Rye running upstairs trying to hold back giggles as he says “Knox put his hand in the toilet,” but that’s not what I want to think about right now. Sigh.

But even if the kids still are a little resistant to use it, particularly in the morning when they just want to stay in the first floor living room and have us read them books and fight over ridiculous things like who can have the most links of a broken plastic chain that Rye brought home from his grandmother’s house from some plant hanger…the weight of the basement being unfinished, and undecided, and unused, is GONE. It is no longer a mental burden, and is quite the opposite — a feast for the eyes. I’m way more willing to go down there and sweep up dust and stray blades of grass because it’s still so stinking perfect. I know it’s not going to last. Someone, either the kids or a neighborhood kid, is going to put a footprint on the wall or run into a wall corner and dent it or something, but for now, it’s perfect.

I hope you get to come by and see it soon!