Mrs. McFrugal

Now that you've seen some of the progress on our basement remodel, I wanted to give you a taste of our vision for that space. First off, you've seen that the walls are painted beige, with white trim. Pretty traditional stuff. The floors will be a wood-grain ceramic tile, similar to this: This is not the exact tile we have, but it's as close as I could find...we got ours at a discount flooring outlet and bought all that they had. I'm not even sure what brand they are. But they are oblong ceramic tiles just like this that look like wood grain. They are all the same length, so we will stagger them to make it look like a hardwood floor, with very small grout lines. Since this will be a ceramic tile floor directly on a cement floor in a basement, the floor will be very cold. We couldn't afford the underfloor heating (it's about $179 for a 1' by 20' roll), so instead I have ordered a large area rug. RugsUSA was having their 80% sale again, which doesn&#

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

So here's something that was a long time in the making...transitions between different types of flooring! We have been living with gaps of about a half inch between the ceramic tile and the hardwoods. Also, the ceramic tile we laid by the back door had started to come loose, so it was time to address all of those issues. We pulled up the loose tiles and could see that the tiles hadn't completely bonded with the mortar. You can see where only the center of each tile had stuck. So, we pulled all of them up, chipped up the old dried mortar, and re-laid the tiles. Then, J re-grouted the tiles...he loves when his picture makes it into my blog :) The new grout was slightly darker than the original grout, but it turned out alright. As for the transitions, we bought T-moldings from Lowe's that matched our flooring. Well, they aren't an exact match...in order to get the ones that match our floor exactly, we would have to special order them and they'd be ar