Basement Renovation - Stage Two

So, when I left off with my last post about our basement renovation, Chad and I had gotten all the paneling and wallpaper off the walls, repaired them and got them ready for paint, and moved the door to one of our basement closets!  (If you missed it, you read the details and see the pictures HERE).

The next part of the project is really where I came in.  Painting!

Oh Boy!  Taping, priming, painting... more taping, more priming, more painting... Wow, can I just say, I was SO done with paint by the time I finished the basement!  It felt great to get it entirely done and know that I (little ole me) had done it all by myself, but it was very time-consuming, very messy, and very tiring!  I had painted before, but not to this degree and not on my own! So this was a learning experience for sure. (On the positive side, I will say that during this time, I was in the process of trying to lose weight, and painting turned out to be a great fat-burning exercise regime!) 

Taping completed, time to start priming! 

 Look at these gorgeous primed white walls:

What an improvement just plain white walls can make! These walls were a blank canvas ready for the color of my choosing! :)

Along with the walls, the large bulkhead on the ceiling got a coat of primer.  This was by far the hardest and most difficult thing I had to paint.  It was made out of the same stained paneling that we pulled off the walls, and because of the stain and the treebark texture, I had to use kilz oil-based primer to cover it.  I don't know if you've used oil-based paint or primer before, but it's nothing like latex.  NOTHING.  It sticks. to. everything. EVERYTHING!  It was the biggest pain in my neck (literally, since I had to look straight up at the ceiling the whole time) of everything in this project.  When I finished it, it was all down hill from there!

Yes, this is me completely covered in oil-based primer.  No, I was not exaggerating.  Yes, I did find primer stuck in my hair up to 5 days after this despite ridiculous amounts of soap and scrubbing.

Anyway, you may have noticed that in some of the pictures above many of the ceiling tiles are missing.  This is because while I worked on painting, Chad was in the process of getting the florescent lights ready to be removed and replaced with the warmer and softer light of recessed potlights on a dimmer switch.  Chad did a lot of the work getting ready to put the potlights in himself, but we hired an electrician to run all the wiring, which turned out to be good because the homeowner before us had made a mess of the electrical and our electrician had to completely rerun everything to make it right.  Plus we wanted to add several extra outlets throughout the basement because, even in the little amount of time we spent in the basement, we always were running out of them.  And we also had him add a few light switches.  Again, we were so glad we made this investment.  He did all the work we had for him in just a few hours and we had peace of mind knowing that it was done properly.  Here are the new potlights after Chad got them all connected:

(And yes, that blue rectangle of painter's tape you see on the wall is marking the spot for a nice new big TV. Teehee :D New basement calls for new entertainment system!)

My next step was to narrow down paint color.  I collected about million paint chips from every store we went in that sold paint.  Chad always laughed when I couldn't walk past the paint displays without grabbing a few more paint chips that caught my eye.  I wanted something soft and calming, without being too neutral since the rest of our house is beige (which I like, but I wanted to throw a little color into this area).  I finally narrowed it down between 2 colors from Benjamin Moore.  Palladian Blue and Wedgewood Gray:

So we bought samples of both of these colors and I painted them on poster board and hung them up on the wall to try to figure out which one we liked best because we all know that colors can look really different from the paint chip to the wall. Here they are in 2 different areas of the basement:

Wedgewood Gray on the left, Palladian Blue on the right.

 

Wedgewood Gray above, Palladian Blue below, shown next to the stone in our basement.

We were fairly sure we liked the Palladian Blue better when we looked at the paint chips and when we saw other examples of it in pictures online, but when we actually got the two colors up in our basement with our lighting, the winner hands down was Wedgewood Gray.  Palladian Blue felt a little too bright and a little too green and a little too beachside.  It said to us "bathroom".  But we loved the dusty blue of the Wedgewood Gray and it looked pretty great with the stone and tile Chad had picked out! (We still love and plan to use Palladian Blue in the future... maybe in our next home!)


Okay, enough progress for one post! :) See how the wall color turned out in my next post (which you can now view by clicking HERE!!) and what we did with the trim!