So, like I said yesterday, we have this large laundry room/basement type area downstairs in our house, which was quickly just becoming a place to house all the things we didn’t want to spend time figuring out how or where to store.

In my mind, 120 square feet is a lot a space.  I mean, this may be because I live in one of the most expensive rental markets in the world.  It may also be because I lived in less than 500 square feet with a giant man (KC) and a very snobby cat (Seuss) for 4 1/2 years.

Either way, KC and I had been tossing around ideas for the laundry space for awhile — workout space?  Guest room?  Indoor hockey rink?  (Yeah, that idea didn’t last long.)

I, being disinclined to do anything that involves manual labor on my part, kept pushing it off — “No, I don’t want to turn it into [insert room type here].”  “That will be too expensive.”  “It’s not a big enough room for that.”

Basically, I’m super fun to live with.

However, with the old couch sitting (what felt like) squarely in the middle of our living room, I finally conceded — “Ok, let’s turn it into a family room.”  Move the old couch down there, and we’d be in business.

A few minor issues — the room has concrete floors.  And not like “nice” concrete floors — like, industrial warped and wonky concrete floors.  Also, there was a giant hole in the wall, the remnant of an old water heater or something.  Either way, there was a 5-6″ circular hole, smack in the middle of the longest wall in the room.  And the lesser issue — all the walls were painted that pukey green color (like the color of rotten algae).

So what did we do?

1. We cleared out all the crap (this included KC moving a giant IKEA storage cabinet up a flight of stairs and into our hallway.  By himself).
2. KC patched the hole (he’s magic) and spackled all the weird dents and divots.
3. We painted.
4. Moved a wall shelf.
5. We laid down carpet.
6. And I styled that business up (y’know, after KC and a friend moved the couch down there).

And because I like to leave you wanting just a little more (and because that room is insanely hard to photograph and I’d like the “after” shots to actually look decent), here’s some before photos and some during shots (post-paint and post-carpet):

(keep in mind that this is after we’d cleared out most of stuff from the room already…)

Don’t be fooled by the way the camera makes the green paint look — it’s awful in real life.

All painted.

You can sort of see how wonky the concrete floor is here…

Carpet!  (And yes, the hallway is still green because it was going to be too hard to paint/we ran out of paint.)

Full reveal of the finished room and what we used for our DIY re-do will be up later!  Get excited.