Finishing Our Basement: Plans & Inspiration

There are so many projects and updates and items on our to-do lists in this new house, that I haven’t even mentioned one of the big ones we’re working on right now: the basement! 

Our house is two stories, but it also has a really big unfinished basement. Luckily, it’s not a dark scary basement, and the previous owners seem to have painted the whole thing right before selling, which makes for a nice look.

It’s not a great space—the ceilings are low, and we live on a pond so some areas have water issues (we have a sump pump to keep it clean). But that won’t stop us from adding a little extra usable space, so we’re finishing about half the basement. 

In this space, we’re adding a movie room and an office for Dustin. It would have been really nice to have these spaces before the COVID-19 situation, but oh well.

Currently, we have it all framed in, and we added spray foam insulation and ran the electrical. We just finished getting the drywall up, so next we will tape and mud.

Our Plans for the Basement Movie Room

We’re so excited because we’re only a few weeks away from finishing our basement movie room. This space will be Dustin’s spare living room, where he might have a few guys over for a game or video game night, or just go to watch a show I’m not into (lol). 

Thankfully, he appreciates my input and wants my opinions as we figure out what to do down here. The plan is to create a living room/mancave with a TV, couch, and bar space.

Image Sources: Love and Marriage | Arlington Magazine | Clare | Clare | Chris Loves Julia | Place of My Taste | Pinterest

First up, we painted the ceiling black. It’s pretty low, and even the few inches necessary for drywall would make the ceiling even lower, so we just with paint. This also leaves everything exposed, in case we need to access any wires or pipes later. 

Once the drywall is finished, we’re going to paint, and Dustin wanted green. We picked Clare’s Dirty Martini for the walls and we’re going to do an accent of Current Mood on the TV wall. We’re still debating doing a paneled wall or just painting the drywall for that accent, but I think the shades of green will be nice with the grey floors.

Then, we’re adding a few accent sconces to really give that movie room vibe, like a movie theater. We’ll add posters or art between the sconces. 

We’re putting in a sofa that my mom has leftover, trading her for the pullout that we had in the City House. Honestly, this room is getting enough budget without spending money on furniture.

Then, we’re going to build a bar/table at the back of the room, under the window. On the wall behind it, we’re planning to build some bar shelves to hold our cocktail shakers, bottles, and other bar tools. (As you may know from our bar cart post, we have a lot of bar tools.)

Finally, we’re going to add a display shelf to show off some of Dustin’s hat collection. He has hundreds of baseball caps, and we don’t want to have all of them on display (it’s a bigger ask to display than my postcard collection), but I really want to honor the collection by showing some off on some floating shelves.

What do you think? Have you finished a basement? Tell me in the comments what you learned!