The Basement Refresh Step by Step

I can't believe it but I can finally say it...the basement is actually done!!!

It took half the summer but it was worth it.  Obviously, if we'd worked at it night and day, we could've gotten it done much sooner but you know, life was happening as well so, I'm good with how long it took.  This was the catch-all space and at times, there was barely enough room for us to workout except on our little 4x6' space we each had on our mats.  The walls were gray cement brick, we had a stud wall the builder put up on the side of the under the stairs portion of the basement.  When we started working out as part of our lifestyle almost 10 years ago, we didn't think we needed more than a spot big enough to do Tae Bo and a shelf screwed into the studs to put a small TV and DVR player.  It was all we needed but it wasn't necessarily a zen den.  It felt more like a dungeon but you know, trainers pay to make their space look like a torture chamber.  I felt like we deserved a nice space to reward ourselves for 10 years dedication on the lifestyle front.  When I mentioned this to Mr., I'm sure he had no clue what he was signing up for.  There was a lot more to tackle than we realized.  I have to say, the before pictures are something out of a nightmare looking back.

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Brace yourself, it looked like a frat house.

Wouldn't you love working out in that space?  The lighting was horrible because, in a desperate attempt for it to look less cave-like on the light front, I strung some C9's up that we had from Christmas.  They hung down and I randomly masking taped them to the joists and we'd crack them with our weights from time to time.  String lights are the best option in the space but you know, actually taking the time to string them out of the way would've been a nice touch.  One of the first things we did was get rid of the Total Trainers, Water Rower, weight bench and A-frame weight rack.  They either weren't getting used, were now off-limits to the Mr or were going to get replaced so off they went to Goodwill.

One of the biggest challenges was we couldn't build a ceiling.  In order for us to do shoulder presses, tricep extensions and any overhead weight movements, even a drop ceiling wasn't an option as we regularly go past the joists for those moves.  I blew the dust off of on my Pinterest account and tried to see what our options were.  We thought we'd found it when I stumbled across glue up styrofoam ceiling tiles.  They sell these styrofoam ceiling tiles that were almost the width between our joists.  I decided to get a sample pack of three designs that appealed to us the most.

As you can see, they really are styrofoam, just like the plates.  You can paint them or if you go direct, pay to have them painted for an extra $2 per tile, I think.  They have all sorts of cool designs, even tin tile looks.  They are perfect solutions if you have popcorn ceilings that you can't afford to have ripped out and redone yet.

We held them up to the area to see what they'd look like.

(Sitting in there kinda wonky so we could both see it but you can see the plywood ceilings we had before.)

We weren't convinced it would be worth the trouble for our space.  Given we'd have to make a trim track on either side of the tile so there wasn't a sunken track beside the tiles and the joists were not even from end to end, we chose to avoid that nightmare.  So we decided to just paint the subfloor and the ugly metal attachments.  Is it glamorous?  No, but it brightened the space SO much that it instantly felt better down there.

I wanted to stain the joists so they wouldn't just have 23-year-old mud, and scuffs from the construction crew still staring at us.  I sanded and stained them and while I loved the initial stain on one side of the first beam, the stain took lighter on the rest of them.  When I needed to buy Old English for something else, I checked to see if it would darken the beams to match the first patch and it did!  I could not go through the staining process again because the fumes were giving me migraines every day.  When that part was done, it was time to drywall the stud skeleton they left us.  This thing was nowhere near square, level or anything that would make it easy on us.  We took a few days to watch some YouTube videos to get a feel for the common theme even though every contractor has their own methods.  You can read about that process here.

When that was finally done, we were moving into the dreaded wall plank part of the refresh.  The entire perimeter of our basement had this drywall situation between the joists but without the wires on 85% of them.

(Bright white ceilings now too!)

Not pretty and I had to drywall the side above the stud wall to match that so we'd have something other than voids with insulation.  While we could've lived with it or just painted them white, the Mr pointed out these wood wall planks in passing at a flooring store.  I think if he knew that saying he liked them would transpire into "hey, let's buy them when we're ready and cut these wood planks with no real power tools of high quality" he would've kept his mouth shut.  But as usual, I was like a starved dog with a bone and we were loading them in the truckster a week later.  That part of things was very tedious because not only did straight cuts need to be made using little more than a jigsaw but we then had to "frankenboard" them together to fit into the spaces we needed them to go.  This took chiseling the hardwood planks off one by one, fashioning a backboard to glue them onto that didn't exist and waiting for everything to dry before being able to hang them.  Needless to say, we went through a lot of Titebond Wood Glue and Liquid Nails but look at the difference it made over the drywall nightmare above!

We hung the shelf back up to finally be able to do workouts without squinting because, you know, this only works for so long.

(Workouts from the tablet on a ladder...mininalism.)

I painted the wall and frankly, it turned out horrible.  Sanding the hump as smooth as you can, proved a formidable task for me but I wasn't going to fix it.  Literally, no one but us will see it and if someone buys the house, it will hopefully be too late for them to notice and they can rebuild the damn thing!  I attempted to reuse the MDF shelf we had down there for 20 years.  I used chalk paint since I read you don't have to prime even with MDF stuff.  I then remembered why I had an almost full quart of Rustoleum's chalk paint left from the bathroom project...Annie Sloan, it is not.  It took 4 coats before I began raging and slapped a coat of primer and the latex paint from painting the cement wall on top to be done.  I'd replaced the flimsy, warped cardboard backing with luan that I stained and made it much stronger.  The problem was the shelves now needed a harder press to get them back into place and I HATED the marble contact paper with the stained back.  Oh yeah, and the paint ripped off all the way down to the black surface I started with in several places.

(FML...and that's before the BIG rip)

As if that wasn't bad enough, I somehow thought since it would fit under the shelf that it would look okay against that wall.  All it did was look pathetic!

I set it aside with a lesson learned and began justifying the need to replace it whilst browsing IKEA.  I wasn't a fan of IKEA before and I just figured it was a fancy name for crap.   Well, mama needed some "crap" to fill that seemingly massive bare wall.  I stumbled up the Brimnes set and it seemed like it would be the perfect fit for our space.  We needed the storage and I knew I could hack it and make it my own.  That gets me to the friggin' wormhole know as IKEA hacks.  I must've spent 3 days looking at websites to see how people were customizing their IKEA stuff.  IKEA Hackers is a great place to start and this pin points you in the right direction too.  I found a hack for a craft table that would be about $200 and I showed it to the Mr and he was on board.  I only have one spot to craft when the urge hits and it basically consumes our dining room table for days to weeks on end.

Once we were almost done with the workout side, the other laundry side was next to get worked on and it was a challenge on its own.  You had this nice, cleaner side then turned around and saw this...

It was enough to make ya twitchy but going through the shelves, the mounds of crap stacked in the middle that was stuff we could've thrown out or donated weeks earlier opened the space up in a way that it probably hadn't been in 20 years.    That was where the new craft table would go along with a laundry center the Mr built to replace our old wire one.

Now it was just a matter of taking the steps to get it all put together.

Come back tomorrow for the big reveal!  FINALLY!


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