Creative Do-It-Yourself Ideas and Inspiration for Your House and Family. Currently making _______________.
We deciding faux barn beams were the way to go for our particular situation. I hope you caught the first post where we catalogued the whole process of making and weathering our beams. In case you missed it, we joined together three boards to look like one solid beam. However, it’s hollow in order to encase the retractable movie screen. After building them, bashing them and staining them, we’re ready to install them. It’s time to get these puppies onto the ceiling!
Back to the basement. There were a few reasons for making ceiling beams. We have a weird, lumpy low ceiling in the basement. Despite having just told you this, we wanted a way to draw attention away from its imperfections, and ceiling beams do just that. They’re also functional – this I will explain in a bit. And lastly, they just plain look good.
Woohoo! My bookshelf dreams are officially actualized. We are so happy with how this whole wall turned out. DIY built-in bookshelves don’t have to be hard. In fact, they went fairly smoothly. If you missed the original build, check out this post first. Then come back here where I have the easy job of showing a bunch of finished after pictures. I got to play with my new camera Joe gifted me for Christmas, so it made photographing these shelves extra fun.
Alright, I must confess: I was 100% all for jumping on the IKEA hack bandwagon for this project. There are so many tutorials about retrofitting the “Billy” cabinet to make floor-to-ceiling bookcases. But when the dimensions didn’t fit our space, we had no choice but to go for a custom solution. And that’s usually where the best ideas are hiding.
You can ask Joe, this was probably the thing I was most excited about when we moved into the house. It was at the top of my list, but not high priority compared to some other projects.
Before the holidays, we left you with a sneak peek of the start of our movie room remodel. Probably not the ideal time to dive into a remodel, but we made it work! We’re now pleased to say we’re nearly finished and have been fully enjoying the new space. Where we left off, we showed you the barn door addition. That was really our launching off point into this room. From there, we tackled the walls and the floor. I’ll walk you through some of our design choices and the whole DIY process.
Welcome to the step-by-step basement remodel! Beginning with the barn door, I guess? Why not start somewhere random, right in the middle? The barn door was the first thing we wanted to build. For no particular reason. I’m glad we did because it informed some of our other choices, like paint color. For a small space or a movie room like this, it makes a lot of sense to build a barn door for privacy, space efficiency, and to block sound and light. It was actually incredibly easy to build this sliding barn door and took Joe only a few hours, including the torching job below.
I’m as surprised as you are that we’re knee deep in a basement remodel. It sort of just happened. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Thanks football season, for spurring Joe on to set up his movie screen. (Shoutout to the Vikings!) We’ve actually been dreaming this room up for, well, since we moved in. We got a head start on the bigger parts of the project this month and will probably wrap things up in the winter. We’re excited to take you guys through our big renovation!
Have you ever played around with milk paint? I’ve used it a few times before and I’ve got to tell you, I’m officially hooked. It’s so easy to work play with. Here’s an easy DIY project that gives new life to old furniture, like this coffee table.
Joe’s coworker Steve dropped off this table for my garage sale and I thought, “Hmmm, this would look great downstairs!” It wouldn’t be the first time I found something to keep from my own yard sale…
I have to confess. This is my favorite part of the entire bathroom. (If you missed any of the bathroom remodel that we did this past winter, you can recap right over here.) I knew I wanted some really chunky wood shelves for the little nook above the toilet, but Joe surprised me with something better than I could have imagined.
There were a lot of little choices we made throughout the process of renovating our basement bathroom. Those little choices can add up to made a big difference in the overall feel of a room. Nothing about them are make or break, but they definitely make the whole space feel uniform and tied together. I always love hearing the stories behind other people’s design choices, so I hope you get some value out of this when deciding which finishing touches to add to your own room! The details are my favorite.