As I posted about back in July, we had our basement renovated. After a co-worker helped punch down the network jacks in my office, I’m pretty much moved in — I’ll still be in “carry something every trip back down the stairs” mode for a goodly while, but for day-to-day working, I’m set. Here are some (annotated) pictures on Flickr — I think things turned out pretty nice…
As I think I’ve mentioned, we’re getting our basement renovated — because a nerd needs his cave, after all. Progress was moving along nicely — our contractor had everything framed up in about a week, and the small bit of plumbing work that was required (installing a new hot water heater and shifting it and the main stack a few feet over in the process) was done pretty quickly too. But then it turned out that we had to get city permits instead of county permits, and we now seem to be stuck in some sort of limbo while we wait for the inspector to show up and sign off on things so the drywall can go up. Anyway, if people are interested, I’ve put some pictures of the process on Flickr.
Did our part for the economy today: morning started with a visit to Ikea to look at beds for TheChild (no bed was purchased, but other stuff was), followed by a BestBuy visit — ostensibly to get a wireless access point, but also resulting in a new receiver for the back room stereo set up.
After a spot of lunch, it was back home, where it was nap time for some, and put stuff together time for me. Built the Ikea stuff, and got the receiver integrated into the stack and working. Considered digging into the access point thing as well, but decided to leave that for tomorrow.
SIG-BEER in the evening, which was entertaining per usual.
We’d like to put up some shelving in the newly-painted study, to put knick-knacks and pictures on. It needs to be wall-mounted, able to match the other (dark wood) furniture we have in the room, and not look goofy in abundance. Those systems where you mount metal rails on the wall are right out. There’s a chair rail on the wall, so anything floor-mounted is out.
Anybody have any pointers to anything that might fit the bill?
Another part of the “remodel the unused dining room/junk hole into a study” project was getting rid of the light fixture that was in there when we bought the house. It’s almost a shame to see it go, because it was very striking (especially the turkeys), but it just wasn’t going to work in the new room. I’m not completely thrilled with the light fixture we ended up with — for some reason, I thought it was going to be bigger — but it fits the room much better, I think.
No, not a 50 year old submissive after a hard scene — the new paint scheme in our study! When we last saw the “repaint the study” project, the primer coat had just been applied. Following that, I did two coats of grey above the chair rail — which turned out really nice:
Below the chair rail, we were using a deep red color. This turned out to be less fun to work with — for some reason, this paint (which was the same base as the grey, just different pigment) was much runnier, prone to streaking, and generally a pain in the butt. For a while, I was fearing the dreaded third coat, but in the end it turned out to not be needed:
Yesterday was the high point of the project: removing the masking tape and getting a look at the final product:
This will be followed by the low point of the project: doing the touch-up work. This is going to take a bit, because there are spots in the red that need it, spots in the grey, and a number of dribs and drabs on trim. Overall though, I’m happy (and more importantly, TheWife is happy) with how the room turned out.