Basement progress...

I finally feel like I'm making a little bit of progress on the painting the basement project! A little background for those who haven't seen our house - the previous owners had 'finished' the basement, although clearly they had done it themselves as it's a noticably amateur job. You can see the drywall tape on most of the walls, there were no door or window frames put on, a couple of the doors are still unfinished wood while a couple were stained deep red(!), etc. We've been slowly getting things into better shape, but it's been a long process since we don't spend that much time down there. So far we have: updated the bathroom with new shower/vanity and painted, painted/recarpeted/decorated the guest bedroom (and spackled the ceilings - that was an adventure!), and painted the other spare room which is now a craft room. So all we have left is the hallway and main family room.

These pictures are the doors into the laundry room directly at the bottom of the stairs. I don't think I have any 'before' pictures, but the closet doors were unfinished wood, there was no doorframe, and the walls were just primed drywall. I painted the wall (and the metal pole) the same color that is in the front hall (it's called Almond Brittle - yum!), and then painted the doors and put up a doorframe. You may be interested to know my tool of choice for doing the doorframe - a quilting ruler! That's right - I drew the 45 degree angles on the corners with my quilting ruler and then cut with a hacksaw. And before you laugh too hard, I would like to point out that the corners met virtually perfectly!

I've already washed and filled the holes in the rest of the hallway, so next up is sanding and then priming and painting that. I was originally planning to paint the family room the same color, but I'm starting to formulate another bold idea for that room... Greg said I can pretty much do whatever I want with paint (as long as it's not pink of course!).

The carpet is still the awful gold/orange/brown thin stuff, but that's a (much more expensive) project for another year...or decade.