Starting work on our Basement Guest Suite

Beginning our basement transformation. Turning our unfinished studio apartment, turned speak easy living room, into the guest suite it always should have been. Or really just finally finishing the studio apartment that will then obviously give us a guest suite. However I want to phrase it, I spent a lot of time and money down here during the renovation that I’ve regretted in the ten years since because I’ve never needed a studio apartment but not finishing this space is out of the question for me.

(HERE’S A FEW PICS OF WHAT WE STARTED WITH SO YOU KNOW WHAT WE MOVED OUT.)

And we do need a space for guests anyway now that we’ve obliterated our guest bedroom into Lodi’s new den…

The largest sofa is gone and the smaller sofa, the corner cabinet, both end tables, the two lamps, all of his sound equipment and guitars that were down here went upstairs.

Back in 2019 Lodi moved in with me in a big hurry as lockdown was imminent, his job shut down and we really didn’t know what the future looked like.

He lived in a different state.

Would there be border closings? Was there any hope that his job would even still be there when the COVID restrictions lifted?

We moved in together after only a few months of dating (which I wouldn’t recommend) but he’d been wanting to get out of his city anyway so the situation just fast tracked us.

I can’t remember why he had to move in a ridiculous hurry. When you move you would at least HOPE to take advantage of it and be able to go through your things, sort, purge, give away, throw away etc. when Lodi had no time at all.

For him it was just get everything into the UHaul ASAP and go.

So, years later, he still has boxes of stuff up in the garage rafters and its been so long now he’s actually a bit fuzzy on what’s even up there. (That’s a job we absolutely have to stop procrastinating on.) Then there’s all of his living life things in the basement.

What happens when you marry late and have to merge two households, this house was already fully stocked. Lodi basically finished this basement just to get a space for his stuff.

Fast forward several years later to converting our guest bedroom to his den and bringing many of his things upstairs finally. There was a lot for him to purge, a lot he hadn’t touched in years and a lot he rediscovered and got pretty excited to start using again.

When we ran into no less then 60 DVDs we both laughed.

I had totally forgotten that when he first moved in I’d been in the middle of working on my living room and had boxed up all of my DVDs to donate.

I had a hard time getting rid of them. Its not like DVDs were cheap! And it wasn’t that long ago when we all had DVD players and a whole collection.

Lodi told me I could just put them with his and I caved.

So, here we are, five years later and I didn’t just donate my DVDs to the library but all of his now too lol.

So that’s where we begin with this post.

In my post about our whole house update I mentioned the two major lessons I’ve learned. Don’t be stubborn with a plan, keep pretty open minded because reality can be very different than expected and, start with an empty room and as clean of a slate as possible.

I took everything off the walls and boxed anything up that wasn’t nailed down.

Then I gave the space a top to bottom scrubbing.

You can see the floor got beat up from one of the sofas so I spot patched that with black rustoleum gloss paint. When we used a Rustoleum garage flooring kit down here we later agreed that we should have just used their paint.

It would have been less expensive and certainly less work.

The “paint” in the flooring kit is a lot thicker (a workout to roll) and dries much harder. The concrete down here is 125 years old (as far as I know) and I think it would have taken much better to a wetter solution that would have even soaked in a bit.

The reason I had to fix that spot was because the flooring is literally harder than the old concrete beneath it so it just chipped off.

You live and you learn lol.

The floor down here still looks pretty good though I think and you can’t really tell where I’ve had to spot paint it to fix it. But the bead board on the walls is another story.

Over time with fluctuations of humidity and temperature this kind of gapping is typical. I dealt with it upstairs too where I used bead board on the ceilings. Fortunately, there is a really easy fix.

I picked up a couple tubes of white caulk and took a bit of time one afternoon. Seems are gone!

The beauty of caulk is that it remains flexible so there won’t be any cracking or seems showing up later.

There’s actually a window down here that we went right over with the bead board.

I’m going to be uncovering it if only because it exists. I paid for it, hacked a hole in the wall and installed it, we might as well be able to look at it!

Once that’s done I need to figure out the furniture and the lighting down here.

We have two end tables, a couple of lamps and a rocking chair out in the garage that I’ll be bringing down. We kept the full size mattress that we purged out of the old guest bedroom so I’ll be building a bed frame for that.

And Lodi’s high top table and chairs will probably be coming back down here as well.

The Edison bulb thing is mostly OK but anyone who ever has to work in that kitchen will hate me even if I add under cabinet lighting… So that’s going to be something to think about.

Also, I don’t want to get rid of the chandelier, but it might not make much sense anymore… Maybe I could sell it?

The kitchen is a whole other blog post as this one is already plenty long lol. But I have to share a picture of this absolutely GORGEOUS hoosier cabinet that my aunt and uncle gave me a few years back.

I moved it out of the kitchen to the left side of the staircase for now.

They gave it to me because it used to be my maternal Grandmother’s so I am really really attached to it. And that unique aquamarine color also happens to be the same color of a little end table I inherited from my great aunt… She and my Grandma were sisters who lived next door to each other forever.

Is it so far fetched to think that they probably painted them together?

Unfortunately though I don’t think the hoosier cabinet belongs down here… I do still have my kitchen island hanging out in the garage though and one thing this kitchen desperately needs is more work space so that might just be the ticket!

We have a coffee table that was down here that’s currently floating around the garage and its almost tall enough to be considered a bench. On the left side of the stairs I would definitely like to add a bench and a line of hooks for coats.

So that coffee table might be getting a thick padded top so it can work as a bench!

I also want to create a padded head board for down here too at some point. So, lots to do and lots to think about! Really excited to finally get under way!