Ta-da!

As promised, here are the pictures of the finished basement.

First, let me show you what it looked like before

These pictures were actually taken three years ago when I went through the house for the inspection before we bought it.  All that furniture and the pictures on the wall belong to the people who owned the house before us, as does the cat in the second picture.  I never took more pictures of the basement after we moved in because it quickly became cluttered and was more or less used for storage.  We certainly did not spend a lot of time down there.

Here’s what it looks like now:

We committed a decorating faux pas by painting over the wallpaper, but it was intentional and so much easier than trying to pull the paper off.  I’m a little foggy on the decorating details since we’re the third family to inhabit this house, but from what I understand the owners who lived here before us loved wallpaper.  Just about every room in the house had some sort of wallpaper when we moved in.  Even our garage is completely wallpapered.  You can see the wallpaper, complete with Panda trim, in this picture here.

All that wallpaper wouldn’t have been a problem if the walls had been properly sized.  I knew nothing about hanging wallpaper and sizing walls and such until I tried to take down the wallpaper in the master bedroom.  Much of the drywall paper came off as we tried to strip the walls of paper and soon realized we had a bigger job on our hands than we originally thought.  The walls in the bedroom still don’t look right, but it’s our room and we don’t much care.  I imagine we’ll have to fix it if we ever want to sell though.

Nathan has since repainted the downstairs bathroom, another project that involved stripping wallpaper and much profanity.  That one did not turn out as expected and we will, at some point, repaint and rethink our vision for that room.  Now that the snow has melted we get to concentrate on our yard, what little of it we have.