Goodbye Smelly Carpet!

Do y'all remember that we have a basement? It doesn't make many, if any, appearances in the blog. That's mainly because we haven't done a darn thing to it since J got the keys to the house. After helping my parents with their house during our summer vacation to Michigan in July, I think we found our motivation again, because we came home with big ideas and energy to attack the basement!

Remember what it looked like before?

It pretty much still looked exactly like that, except add a bajillion more stains on the carpet (they seemed to creep up from below!) So, the carpet had to go!

Once we got all the carpet out, it was time to paint the walls. We wanted to do that before we put in the new floors, because I tend to be a messy painter :)

Oh, hi Penny!

The walls were like an off-white that had yellowed over time. And speaking of yellow, the stairwell was painted a hideous yellowish-green. SO BAD. Also, the "built-in" bookshelves left a nice pattern on the wall...

Cuuuuuuuute. You can also see the spot near the door where the previous owners' dogs apparently waited unsuccessfully to be let outside...since that door goes to the garage. 

We took a piece of our new floor tile to Home Depot and picked a paint color based on that. Since our floor tiles are a wood-grained ceramic tile, we went with a light beige for the walls. 

We still need to paint the door white--it's the color that the walls used to be. Oh, goodbye yellow stairwell!

We're so excited to finally be making progress in the basement! We will start installing the floor this weekend, and I have ordered a rug since the ceramic tile will be VERY cold on the tootsies!! And also because we don't have furniture for this room yet...we have it picked out, it's a sectional sofa from IKEA, we just have to save our pennies! So until then, we can sit on the floor and enjoy the product of all our hard work!