Old House, New Owners
Well here’s a blast from the past! A friend of ours who is house hunting stumbled upon this little property. Look familiar? Fun to see what they changed and what they left the same.
Movie Room REVEAL
Movie Room Remodel Reveal
It’s official! We’re finished with the movie room. Or at least, finished for now. Truth be told, most of the work was done towards the end of last year, but all the finishing touches took some time. Instead of posting a play-by-play like we did with the big bathroom remodel, this time around we thought it would be fun to do one big reveal.
Enter if you dare.
Wood Ceiling Beam Straps
DIY Faux Ceiling Beams Straps
Getting creative with our fake ceiling beams, we wanted to find a way to make them look more like the real deal. So we engineered some metal straps/brackets out of cleats. We’re so happy with the outcome, and even more happy to say the ceiling beams are totally complete. Function meets fashion all the way. To recap, this is the final post out of a three-part tutorial on our faux barn wood ceiling beams. To see how we made and installed the ceiling beams, check out these posts 🙂
Installing Ceiling Beams
Ceiling Beam Installation
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!
DIY Wood Ceiling Beams
DIY Wood Ceiling Beams
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.
Styled Bookshelves | DIY Built-ins
Finishing Built-in Bookshelves
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.
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
DIY Built-in Bookshelves
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.
Before
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.
Movie Room: Walls, Doors & Floor
Basement Remodel: Walls, Doors and Floor
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.
DIY Wood Barn Door
DIY Wood Barn Door
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.
DIY Movie Room Remodel: Big Plans
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!