Finishing A Basement: Details and Finish Work

A Finished Basement: The Open Space and Guest Room

This is the view that is just the opposite of the family room.  From here the kitchenette is on the right (you can see a bit of the wood beam and tile there).  We plan on putting a ping pong table or something like that here for the kids and their friends to use.  Oh, and for Garret and I to become overly competitive about, I’m sure. 🙂

We got our carpet installed through Home Depot.  It is from their Life Proof line.  Gorrono Ranch II and the color is Victorian.  We got their prime padding and it is a dream to walk on!

And if you go left from here you’ll see this:

After wrapping that steel beam in wood, my very close 2nd favorite decision I made was to have the interior doors painted in this amazing dark Wrought Iron (from Benjamin Moore) color!  Can you stand the beauty?  Imagine if they were just white.  Boring, right?  I mean, I thought it would look cool but I had no idea the impact the dark doors would have.  So glad we did it!  Oh and the walls are Sherwin-Williams Comfort Gray and the trim is a custom color match to the Amsterdam cabinets we ordered from Home Depot.

The left door is finished under-the-stairs storage.  The first door on the right is unfinished storage where the furnace and water heater are.  The 2nd door on the right is the bathroom.  And the door straight ahead is a finished storage space where we have some sturdy shelves built made out of 2x4s and plywood for things like my husband’s extensive sports memorabilia collection, important documents, office supplies, etc.  We laid down some inexpensive flooring (it really only took about 2 hours to do!) in there before the baseboards were installed and it turned out fantastic in there!  No pics yet as it is definitely a disaster so far and you can’t even SEE the floor right now but I will update this post when it gets all squared away!

If you go left around that corner you’ll see this:

A storage closet and the stairs are off to the left and the guest room is straight ahead!  I cannot tell you how happy I am to have a guest room again! Now, when people come to stay I don’t have to rearrange my kids and deep clean my teenage son’s room (yuck).

A clever little trick that my contractor came up with was when we had an issue with a support pole.  It didn’t really line up with the staircase wall to make a nice flat wall spanning across there.  So he hid the pole inside that bump out there on the left side of the door and created another one on the right side to match so it looked like it was on purpose.  Genius!  My only regret is that we didn’t also wrap the support beam above in wood rather than drywall it in.  I don’t know why I didn’t even think about doing this one!  Gah!  Oh well.  If that’s my biggest regret then I guess we did pretty dang good.

And here is the other side of that awesome fireplace!

It gets so cold down there I am SO HAPPY we have that fireplace both for the family room as well as the guest room. Guests would freeze down there without it in the winter time!  And don’t you love that light fixture?  I ordered it from Joss & Main.  It’s called the Beatrice Semi-Flush Mount and it’s such a pretty aged gold.  It’s my favorite.  And my daughter freaked out once while watching Fixer Upper because Joanna Gaines had put this same style chandelier in one of her fixer uppers!  We literally squealed.

The fireplace surround is 5″ tongue and groove that mimics the shiplap look.  And with the addition of a floating mantel that spans the entire wall plus some more 12×24 marble tiles for the hearth, it was complete!

And here’s what it looks like looking back toward the door from the fireplace (again, loving the dark doors).  It’s not gigantic but it definitely gets the job done!  And I’m hoping to go big on some pretty details here in the near future to make it all come together.  Stay tuned! 🙂

Are you exhausted yet?  That was quite the tour!  

Some Final Little Basement Tips:

• We installed a few of these around in the family room area for charging devices. They are genius!  We have lots of teenagers hanging out down there these days and these outlets definitely come in handy
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• Keep a little notebook or something where you keep track of all of your purchases, color choices, etc.  It will save you a lot of headache later when people ask or you need that information for whatever reason!  
• Look for a contractor who is easy-going and will work with you on things.  I cannot sing Wes Jamison of White River Construction Corp.’s praises enough.  He is here in the Denver Area and if you’d like his number send me a note!  He’d love to come bid out a job for you!
• Measure, measure and measure again before ordering things.  Trust me.
• We put everything we could on a dimmer switch.  Because…why not, right? 
• Make sure you are ordering some of the details (like light fixtures and mirrors) early so they can be installed and things can be adjusted as needed.  I was surprised when I needed to know what mirror I wanted in the bathroom when we still had studs down there because Wes needed to know where to put the electrical for the vanity light.  You think you have plenty of time for that but it’s way better to have some of those decisions made early.
• Get your carpeting ordered early as well.  I was shocked that it was going to be three weeks before they could install it!  I don’t know why I thought they would run out and do it in a matter of days (#naive).
• If you can, spend some time doing the things you CAN do so that your contractor doesn’t have to spend his time doing them.  For example, I did a lot of research and figuring out what cabinets I wanted in the kitchenette.  Then I went ahead and ordered them.  He then backed out the price of the cabinets from his bid.  Yes, he could have spent time coming to me with a few choices and then had me narrow it down but I DIDN’T WANT him spending time on that kind of stuff when I was just as capable to do it myself.  I’d rather he be working on the electrical (which I can’t do) while I peruse some websites (which I can do).  Same with the tile.  I went and figured out what I wanted then he figured out how much we needed and went and picked it up.  It’s a big project and definitely a team effort!
• Be flexible!  <<< I can’t over emphasize that one.

So, just in case you were wondering about how much it would be to finish a basement like this, it came out to be just a little over $60K.  There are a LOT of factors that go into the price but I will say that I got bids as high as $80K for this baby so we were ecstatic that we could get it done for around $60K.  Plus, I can already tell you that is has been worth every penny.  It’s our favorite hang out and our house feels like it doubled in size.  It forced us to really reduce and become selective with what we were keeping since our storage area became much smaller but it was the best thing ever to get rid of stuff we DID NOT need! A forced weed-out is sometimes the only way you’ll do it.

If you want to see the beginning of this whole process and what our basement was like before (you should be scared but I know you can be brave) click HERE. 

To go back to the beginning of this post click HERE.