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 2nd 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 3rd 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!
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