Basement Renovation - Stage Three

It felt like it was long in the making, but Chad and I finally finished our basement renovation!  You can see how we started it HERE, and see some of the progress we made HERE.  When I left off last time, I had primed the walls and bulkhead on the ceiling, and picked out a pretty paint color (Benjamin Moore's Wedgewood Gray), and was ready to put it up on the walls!

Here's how one coat of that dusty blue turned out.  I do have to say that it looks somewhat different on the camera than in real life, and the color changes depending on the lighting. (Also, sorry about all the clutter.  We didn't have any place to put a lot of the furniture we keep down there, so it all got pushed in the center of the room... Try to ignore it.)

I really love how it turned out!  While I was working on this, Chad was cutting out holes in the ceiling tile, for the new potlights.  We had to buy a box of new ceiling tiles to try and match the old ceiling tiles (those things are expensive, man!) They looked pretty much identical except that the new ones were slightly whiter, but unless we point it out to people, no one seems to notice! ;)

You can see in this picture, also, that the bulkhead is getting ready to be painted.  I didn't paint the walls right under the bulkhead, because I knew how messy it got when I primed it originally.  But I finally mustered up the strength and got it done.  Putting the coat of paint on over the primer turned out to be soooo so much easier than priming it had been. (Oil-based paints are the worst!).

It ended up only needing one coat of paint (because that's all I was willing to do! LOL).  We painted it the same color as the doors and the color I was going to paint the trim, only in a "flat" finish instead of "semi-gloss".  The color is called Ballet White by Benjamin Moore, but we had actually gotten a color match of it from Sherwin Williams when Chad had done the other painting in the house, so that's what we did again to make sure it matched perfectly.

So with that done, I was now free to start painting the trim.  Blah.  I was putting this off, too.  Since the trim was all stained wood, it required more of the horrid oil-based primer to cover it before painting.  And I ended up actually kind of liking the way the color of the stained trim looked with the paint color and floor color, but I knew I would like it better in white, and it would just look more modern and updated to go ahead and paint it.  So here it is with a coat of primer:

Definitely glad I sucked it up and took the time to do the trim.  It really helps make the space look "finished".

After the trim was completely up and primed, it was time to do the baseboard (which we decided not to reuse, but instead bought new pre-primed baseboard in a different shape... the old baseboard was just a solid square block of wood and we wanted something a little fancier). This was a little out of our realm.  Fortunately for us, my dad is an outstanding contractor and he was so sweet and willing to help us out!   

He also helped us out with a new door to the patio outside.  I really really wanted a new door.  This was the old one:

There's nothing wrong with this door at all. But... there is only one window in the basement and I really wanted to make sure when we were done this renovation the basement wouldn't be dark and dingy anymore.  Plus, we had just spent a great deal of time and effort doing the patio outside it, and I thought it would be super awesome to actually be able to look out and see it!  So Chad was super sweet and agreed to do it!  And with some help from my dad again, it turned out to be not a terribly tough thing to do.  We kept the framing and just ordered a 9 lite door that would fit in it, and Chad's parents were able to put the old door to good use!

Wow! What a huge difference this light makes!! Even the paint looks different with the new lighting! I LOVE it!!  Here it is from the outside:

Next up was to paint the trim and the new door in that pretty Ballet White color:

And we updated the door hardware from brass knobs to nickel handles:

Here's the door to the patio before and after.  We decided to put a keypad lock on it so that we could easily get in this way if we had been outside and didn't want to go in through the garage. :)

Before

After

The keypad on the outside of the door

So with those final touches, the "construction" part of the reno was DONE!  And then it was time for the fun part! ;) Decorating.  You can now click HERE to see the big reveal, after everything was decluttered and the furniture was back in place (plus a couple new pieces including one super fun DIY Bench that Chad and I built from scratch! :)