Let There be Light!

We now have 6 can lights in the basement instead of the previous 4... and what a huge difference. Not really so obvious on the picture, but light level is much better. And since we seem to have an addiction to dimmers around here, we, of course, added dimmers on all the lights. It will make for quite an ambience.

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Painting - Done. Well, Almost.

Whew. It has been a VERY long weekend of painting - painting a 720 sq ft room... including doors, door casings, trim, etc... I'm glad it's done... well, it's all done except the stair case railing. We're still deciding if we're going to paint that right away or not. I think we will. But I have to say, aching back and all, it just looks great. The new colors really make the room feel so warm and cozy... and we haven't even put in the wood stove yet! So, here are the pics....

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Mid-Day Painting Update

The painting of the basement walls is going quite well today. I must give Valspar paint from Lowes' a big thumbs up. It appears as though the main walls will only need one coat of my Caramel Toffee paint (the picture makes it look a little oranger than it is). I think I might need another coat on some of the trimmed out areas, but that's easy enough to deal with. So after painting Grace's room with the cheap-o paint from Walmart (two coats required - and sometimes three!), you're definitely money ahead to buy the Valspar at Lowes' (Lowes' can send my endorsement check to 179...).

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Let the Basement Remodeling Begin...

So, I decided I'd had enough of the old, thrown-together-with-whatever we-could-dig-out-of-the-trash or-beg-off-family-and-friends basement. That's right, the 70's avacado green, orange, and harvest gold couch is OUTTA HERE (I've included some terribly embarrassing pictorial proof of the appearance of my basement before)! We had also had enough of the nasty carpet. A basement is just not a good place to have carpet. Now, granted, our basement is probably 95% dry (except in very extreme wet conditions & then only wet in specific small areas...), but there's still always the battle of the general presence of a musty aura.

So, the seating furniture has sold (it's a miracle). I will take the end tables & coffee table and refinish those next week. We have emptied the room of everything... and I mean EVERYthing. We pulled the carpet, the carpet pad, the baseboards, scraped carpet glue residue, scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, (did I mention I've scrubbed the floor?) Yes, it's now down to bare cement floors. This weekend I will paint the walls (a fabulous rusty burnt orange) and trim work (cream) - (normally I'd wait until after the floor, but a timeline is pushing me :-). I'll post some after pictures of how that turns out next week. We'll add and move lighting next week as well. After that, the staining of the cement floor will begin... and that is some very cool stuff! Due to a fine kinfolk of mine named Clint Howle, I will have the added luxury of using one of the best products around on my cement floor... Dye-n-Seal from Ameripolish. This stuff will make my project a cinch... or at least relatively speaking. The whole concept is that you get yourself down to a clean cement floor, apply the stain via a spray on technique, do some post-stain cleaning, and then apply a sealant to protect and seal the B-E-A-UTIMUS cement floor you've just created. This will be very cool indeed. Clint's Ameripolish website has some fantastic pictures of jobs they've done around the area... some REALLY impressive stuff. I know I had no idea that some of the things they did were possible with concrete dies. These guys are talented. Now, since this is more of a DIY project, the intricacy of the project is much simplified... I'll be using one dye... Saddle Brown. And I won't be scoring the surface or anything fancy like that. But what a huge difference this is going to make to the look of our basement living area! I can't wait to see it all finished. I'll keep you posted!

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