Better than shuffleboard.

We had carpet installed in the basement for the first time after the pipe burst and flooded the basement 18 months ago. Before it was carpeted, the floor was linoleum covered concrete. The linoleum was a dark, depressing gray with darker gray spots in it. The only color on the floor was the shuffleboard court that had been pieced together with colored pieces of linoleum.

It was horrible on so many levels. When we first bought the house, I had visions of Bugster's having friends over and playing shuffleboard in the basement. It could be fun. I knew they would think it was silly, but that they'd have fun with it. However, within a few months, I realized that would never happen. I knew we had way too much stuff to ever have the entire floor cleared in order to dedicate half the basement to shuffleboard. Wasn't going to happen.

The walls of the basement were depressing enough. They were wood paneling, but they were the dark gray with darker shades of gray in the grain of the wood. If I look back at pictures, I'm sure the walls won't be as I remember them. For all I know they won't even be gray. One thing that I know I remember correctly is that they were very, very dark. Add the two tones of gray for the floor, and the basement was melancholic and cave-like.

There are other reasons the basement felt oppressive, but I think you get the idea. It wasn't really a place where we wanted to spend a lot of time, and I wanted to change that. So I hung a huge chalkboard on the wall for the girls to play with, and we put a cute little wool rug in front of the faux fireplace, so they could pretend to be sitting by the fire when they dressed up in their dress up clothes. At one point, I even moved the furniture around toward the end of the room around to create a partition and put a bed back there for a spare bedroom.

I tried. In one attempt to make the family room more appealing and cheery, I painted the paneling. I'd paint the large sections a light green followed by a skinny section painted light blue followed once again by a large light green section and ending the overall pattern with a skinny stripe of light pink. In the pin stripes between the larger vertical stripes, I used a small syringe filled with white paint to allow it to flow all the way down the wall in the grooves. It filled in the areas between stripes nicely and with the baseboards painted white and the fresh coat of white paint on the ceiling, it looked like a totally different room. The only problem was that I'd only gotten half done with the paint job before life exploded, and I didn't get back to it before the flood.

Fast forward to today...

The Hubster and I worked on our new family room today. It doesn't come close to resembling the room it was when we bought the house. The shuffleboard has been replaced with a thick and amazingly comfortable carpet. The walls, which are no longer paneling are painted two shades of sage green topped with a nice white crown moulding and tall white baseboards. There are still a few holes that need filled with wood putty and painted over to finish it off, but we're almost done down there.

Besides working on the crown moulding today, we got the treadmill in it's final resting place. It was much easier said than done. Treadmills are heavy even when they fold up and have wheels to help making move them easier. We put it off for entirely too long, so we're thrilled it's finally where it needs to be, so we can use it. We got the chain shortened on the hubby's heavy bag that's hanging mere feet from the treadmill, and got the mats put in place, so we can eventually move his pull up/dip/exercise station down there as well.

We finished cutting the holes in the rest of the doors that we'll have hung downstairs by next weekend.

I used Goo Gone to get rid of the tape residue on the oak cabinets we'd gotten to use in my craft area. As i was cleaning the gunk off them, I started really getting excited about organizing my craft things. They sparkled, and it was just plain contagious!

I'm excited that we're getting that much closer to finishing things up. Once we're done down there, I can get back to the dehoarding.

I'm ready.