Hello my friends! Today is the day my mom and dad married, 49 years ago. I’m so grateful that I lucked out with them for parents! Isn’t my momma a beauty??….and I love my dad’s trademark look in all photos – *smiling on the inside*
This week marks WEEK FOUR in Linda of Calling It Home’s One Room Challenge. I’m thrilled to be a linking participant in the challenge because it has inspired me to get moving on our basement, which we finished 2.5 years ago and I have yet to decorate!
First off: bear with me during this challenge because a room with almost no natural light is proving to be beyond my photographer’s capabilities. The colors look a bit off and the leather couches look *really* shiny thanks to all the overhead lighting, but hopefully you can get a sense of how this is all coming together.
Now that we’re at week 4, let’s review.
This basement playroom/rec room/kids’ hang out space is basically a big square cut in two by the beam and pillars.
One half is the TV area and the other will eventually house a pool/ping pong table, but for now it serves as a knee hockey arena.
When the basement was finished, I had the walls painted Edgecomb Gray. It’s a really great GREIGE, and I wanted a blank canvas to work with.
My main goal of the ORC is to focus on the TV wall, while keeping in mind furniture that will migrate into this space down the road. Eventually there will be 2 large brown leather couches and two brown rattan chairs in this space.
For the ORC, I want to make the TV wall a gallery wall. Since I need something to offset all that BROWN and beige, I painted just that wall a deep dark charcoal. As you walk down the stairs you can see it….
And I am LOVING the color!! I love how it works with the browns in the room – the warm/cool balance feels so good and it’s the perfect backdrop to the colorful travel photos that will be hung on this wall.
This door leads to the breakers and water shut off valve (all the other utilities are in the unfinished part of our basement but it would have been a huge headache to move these, so they stayed.) I decided to paint this wall and door, and the jury is still out about this choice. What do you think?
A little trick I just learned for painting baseboards, or in this case, door trim, that abutts carpeting:
Press packing tape on the carpet, right up to the trim,
then use one of these scraper thingys to push down the tape & carpet, and paint.
When the paint is dry remove the tape. Packing tape has a better tack than painter’s tape and doesn’t have bleed through. This trick worked like a charm for me!
Last week I shared with you a coffee table and end table I painted for the space.
Oh so sadly, when I dragged the end table down there I realized the light gray was totally wrong for the room. There is already so much blahness going on down there, the table just got swallowed up by the sea of beige.
If at first you don’t succeed…….
paint, paint again.
The coffee table is getting some special loving, more on that next week!
The gallery wall is in the works…..pictures have been ordered, and I’m playing around with frames I already have before I hunt down some fillers with my 40% off coupon at Michaels.
Next week I’ll show you how I framed this huge nautical map on the super-cheap!!
That’s it for now. Check out all the other linkers’ projects over at Calling It Home!
