House2: Storage Room Makeover
When someone finished the basement in House2, they created an odd little room right at the bottom of the stairs. It's not very big. It has no windows. It has shelves on the upper halves of 1.5 walls. It's a very wonderful room because it has no logical purpose at all except to store stuff, so you can fill it floor to ceiling and not feel guilty for having wasted any useful space.
Well, I shouldn't say "no good purpose" because the last person to own the house clearly used to keep their dog in there. The carpet was grroooosss when we moved in, so it was one of the first things to be removed from the house. But the storage room wasn't really a priority and anyhow, I didn't want to waste the leftover bamboo on the storage room, so we just barely got around to doing anything about it. Here's what it looked like until a week ago:
And a closeup of the floor, which had carpet tack strips nailed to the edges and carpet glued in the middle:
After some research we decided to buy ugly gray commercial tiles for flooring. The lady at Lowes tried to talk me out of them on the grounds that they would be difficult to work with. I'm not sure why she thought they would be difficult because they really weren't much trouble at all. Sure, the flooring now looks like the hallway of every elementary school in the nation, but who's going to see it?
Friday last week, I pryed up the tack strips, filled the holes they left with cement crack filler. Saturday I primed the floor with shellac-based primer and the walls with latex primer, then used leftover paint from elsewhere in the house to paint the walls.
Sunday, we laid the tile. The gray here is tile, t he yellow is tile adhesive, and the white is primed cement subfloor.
We actually managed to get 3/4 of the floor done during Vivian's 2-hour nap, which was great. I dealt with the gluing, Mike did the cutting.
And here's a really bad "after" picture. We haven't yet put down baseboards -- that's our goal for tomorrow.
Here's a better picture of the right corner:
My "goals" for this weekend are to finish all the baseboards (in the storage room, the empty room upstairs, and near the closet in my office) and to move the spare washer & dryer to the garage so I can post them on Craigslist or Freecycle and get rid of them. If time permits, maybe we could put a catdoor into the laundry room door so we don't have to leave it open all the time.
Well, I shouldn't say "no good purpose" because the last person to own the house clearly used to keep their dog in there. The carpet was grroooosss when we moved in, so it was one of the first things to be removed from the house. But the storage room wasn't really a priority and anyhow, I didn't want to waste the leftover bamboo on the storage room, so we just barely got around to doing anything about it. Here's what it looked like until a week ago:
And a closeup of the floor, which had carpet tack strips nailed to the edges and carpet glued in the middle:
After some research we decided to buy ugly gray commercial tiles for flooring. The lady at Lowes tried to talk me out of them on the grounds that they would be difficult to work with. I'm not sure why she thought they would be difficult because they really weren't much trouble at all. Sure, the flooring now looks like the hallway of every elementary school in the nation, but who's going to see it?
Friday last week, I pryed up the tack strips, filled the holes they left with cement crack filler. Saturday I primed the floor with shellac-based primer and the walls with latex primer, then used leftover paint from elsewhere in the house to paint the walls.
Sunday, we laid the tile. The gray here is tile, t he yellow is tile adhesive, and the white is primed cement subfloor.
We actually managed to get 3/4 of the floor done during Vivian's 2-hour nap, which was great. I dealt with the gluing, Mike did the cutting.
And here's a really bad "after" picture. We haven't yet put down baseboards -- that's our goal for tomorrow.
Here's a better picture of the right corner:
My "goals" for this weekend are to finish all the baseboards (in the storage room, the empty room upstairs, and near the closet in my office) and to move the spare washer & dryer to the garage so I can post them on Craigslist or Freecycle and get rid of them. If time permits, maybe we could put a catdoor into the laundry room door so we don't have to leave it open all the time.