the house tour: downstairs to the basement

There isn't much of a before and after for the basement. The basement just "is." We use the space but we haven't made much effort to improve it. That's mostly due to the fact that it was already much nicer than your average basement when we moved in. I have a few plans for how to organize the laundry area, but everything is functional now and so improvements here are a pretty low priority compared to the rest of the house. I present to you the finished half (2/3's?) of the basement:

Besides accumulating more exercise equipment (I could use some recommendations for a good, well-padded treadmill) and hanging some pictures on the wall, this is pretty much how it's going to stay. Oh, and when we eventually get a bigger TV for the living room, the upstairs TV will get demoted to the basement. I look forward to it!

Here's the unfinished basement and laundry room. It isn't pretty and I try to never come in barefoot (who knows what I'll step on?!) but it's all good.

We put bars on our windows (after repairing the glass, of course) and put up a lot of shelving. We also insulated the pipes, though we could still make improvements in that respect by sealing up a few holes where the pipes pass between rooms. The other side of the basement is our "bike shop" and paint storage area--the hanging bikes cover up the door to the crawl space.

And now a surprise! A room never before featured on our blog, mostly because I usually forget it exists. Our basement half-bath. In fact, we even forgot to count the window in there when we bought and installed our security bars. Oops! Anyway, that's on the to-do list. And at some point, the whole bathroom is going to have to get redone, but it's not even worth thinking about, since it's way way into the future. For now we just keep the door shut and remember to run water through the pipes about once a month.

So the basement to-do list is relatively short:

• buy a treadmill (that one doesn't even really count...)
• hang some pictures
• fill in some gaps where the pipes cross between rooms
• hang security bars in bathroom window

Next time: upstairs!