If you've landed here from the One Room Challenge, Welcome! We've just purchased an 80's contemporary home in Upstate NY that just needs a little TLC to bring her back to her former glory.
So we've been living in our new home in Upstate NY for about two months now. This house is admittedly, crazy big. We really didn't need this big of a house, but dammit did the aesthetic and location and yard and price call to us. It has turned out to be a BIT more of a fixer upper than originally anticipated, but that's ok. Every time a new problem pops up, we find ourselves groaning for a minute, and then enjoying digging in and trying to fix the problem ourselves. We've gotten braver over the years and have had pretty good luck so far. Cue the angels singing harmoniously. I'm living my dream, man.
So clearly an attempt to troubleshoot a slow drain in a kitchen sink last week would snowball into creating a budget basement home theater right? I'm sorry, do you not see the obvious thought process on this one? Let me explain.
As previously mentioned, this house is quite a bit bigger than our last house. This is not often a complaint you hear from home owners. And I'm not complaining, but I do want to find ways to creatively use these spaces. Once you've ticked off the obvious bedroom, tv room, play room, etc. areas that a family with two young kids wants, you start to get creative with the rest. Enter the Budget Home Movie Theater on the side of our semi-finished basement. We technically bought a screen and projector and used our old SONOS system a month ago and set it up some pillows and folding chairs and that was it. But after an attempt to unclog and plunge a slow drain in our kitchen, which in turn caused us to burst a pipe in our basement in front of the screen, which caused a disgusting amount of stinky water to spill onto the carpet, and splatter on the poorly painted walls I thought to myself, hey, didn't the One Room Challenge start this week? Maybe this is my chance to get back into blogging after a 2 year hiatus and albeit sporadic posting schedule previous to that.
Still with me? So let's talk about the plan and why we are calling this a budget makeover. It's less about the ability to spend and more about the practicality of spending too much on this space.
Reason #1 - I have serious PTSD regarding water in houses (stories I'll eventually blog about). Even though this basement is already semi-finished (distinct rooms from additions built in the 80s, wall to wall carpeting in certain areas) I will NEVER trust putting up any new drywall in a basement. I've been burned too many times. I don't even get upset anymore when I see water coming in through a ceiling or wall. However, accepting home ownership woes and being a masochist are two different things. What I'm trying to say is we've decided to visually split the usage of this room with paint and furniture, versus adding a wall to make it distinct and separate from the typical rec-room area stuff.
Reason #2 - My kids destroy everything. This is of course a slight exaggeration, but I do not have it in me to spend thousands of dollars on a nice leather sectional while they are 2 and 4. We started a having family movie night a few months back (in NJ) and they are allowed to eat popcorn on the couch on Friday nights. Greasy, buttery popcorn. It's October, so I can't help but hand them little Halloween treat bags of M&Ms too. Contrary to popular belief, I'm not a complete ice queen. So we are searching for second hand or cheaper (and probably not exactly pretty) new couches for this area. The ceiling is too low to do traditional movie theater stadium seating, though we did consider building a platform and nixed it. A sectional with a few reclining seats or a sleeper sofa (sleepovers in a few years!) is the goal.
Reason #3 - It just doesn't seem necessary to go full fledged makeover. Is anyone else exhausted in reading about online/seeing IG photos of/watching TV shows about gut renovation jobs? I love me a good before and after, and yeah, we did that in our last house. A lot. This house doesn't NEED any of that right now. And I'm happy to call myself a slow decorator (much to Tom's dismay). So now that we are doing this ORC, we will probably pull together a few more things than what I would have normally done, but I can also appreciate calling a spot in our house complete.
The plan:
Clean, paint, buy seating, update the lighting, hang curtains, think of a plan for our halved table (more on that later), create a snack area, agree on movie posters to hang because why not. Maybe pretty up the rec room side of basement too, I don't know, I don't know if we'll have time.
And of course, thank you to Linda and the team at One Room Challenge for continuing to host such a fun group experiment. As always, the Featured Designers will link up on Wednesdays, and Guest Participants will link up on Thursday through November 8th!
(Also, if you noticed and are wondering, you are not crazy. This Week 1 post is not linked up to the Week 1 Guest page because, yeah, I'm jumping in at Week 2 and missed that boat. Please accept me for who I am as a blogger.)
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