Well, I’ve had this post curing in my drafts for awhile, hoping for better pictures.  These will just have to do, I guess…

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This was my craftroom in the basement before, which was totally open to bugs and the like…and really messy:

Totally hard to believe I wanted something nicer, eh? 😉

When we were planning the basement, we knew we needed a guestroom down there.  We have a 4 bedroom house, but one is rather small and wouldn’t fit our queen guest bed.  That room has been Anya’s room, but she is growing out of the small room.  Lord knows her closet is way too tiny!  Kai’s closet is 4x the size of hers.  That is just  not acceptable for a girl.  Actually his closet will still be bigger, but his room faces the street and the future teenage boys across the street, so I think we can all agree that she gets the smaller closet and the room to the back of the house. 😉

I also wanted a craftroom down in the basement.  It became apparent that the guestroom and craftroom needed to take up the same space.  What to do?  A murphy bed, of course!  We don’t have guests very often, so on the rare occasion we have an overnight guest I can get it all cleaned up and put right and the pins swept off the floor.  It took awhile to find one that will take a pillow-top mattress.  They are tons of varieties out there and I didn’t want to spend a fortune on a bed that will only need to take occasional use.  I found one through Versare, which is of decent quality.  There are some issues, but overall I like it.  The bed is one solid piece that comes down and not the bi fold doors that many of them have.   We had some issues with it staying closed, and had to put on some extra hardware.  It is probably because we have a pillow-top and most beds are made to fit a regular mattress.  At least it fits good enough.

I originally envisioned a big wall-length counter with storage for my crafting.  Well, that didn’t pan out, so it needed to be on the same wall as the bed.  It has enough room for my sewing machine and serger – almost 5 feet of space.  A lot of the storage is now in the closet.  As you can see in the photo above, I had a lot of fabric to store.  😀

The closet just has some kit shelves by Closetmaid.  I have plenty of storage for fabrics, and have somehow managed to fill it up!  (Another note on screwups…when I ordered the doors this was the only one that didn’t come with a jam and casing.  Do you think the salesguy told me that??  NO!  Of course, not!  The guys made the jam up themselves and stained as close as they could.  I ordered the casing unfinished, which was delivered the next day (I think they knew I was pissed) and they were able to get it stained and up before they were done with their last week of work.

The floor is cork.  It is warm and nice to walk on.  I think it looks a bit like leather. 

The window you see here is that big egress window we had dug and put in the space.  It took a bit but they finally figured out how to deal with the standing water issues.  They ended up having to drill into the foundation to the drain tile underneath for the water to find a spot to go.  We think there are underground springs around here and there is probably one pretty close to this window.  The water was coming in pretty steadily apparently.

The dresser is a temporary fix right now.  It is an “antique” in the sense that it has been well used in Brian’s family.  We’ve had it for a while and it’s missing a few of the handles, the drawers stick, the stain is quite worn in places and the mirror has age spots on it (which is why it isn’t being used!).  Apparently it is worth a whopping $200, because I saw one in an antique store in Jamestown, CA a few years back.  Only that one apparently was never used and in good condition.  Ah well, nothing that some decorative runners and well placed accessories can’t dress up a bit. 🙂

I didn’t really want an expensive stone countertop and those laminate ones weren’t really floating my boat either.  I wanted it to look more like furniture, so I bought a 60″ wood dining table that was on clearance.  It had a big crack down the middle of it, so I filled that with silicone and then painted it to match the other cabinets.  The guys cut one end off of it so it was desk depth, and attached it to the wall.     

The artwork in the space was stolen from Anya’s room.  Being the pink obsessed little girl that she is, they won’t match the new color scheme in her room, so right now her walls are fairly bare.  They match perfectly down here, and I just love Amy Brown’s fairies.  These were prints taken from an expired calendar.  I simply cut them out and put them into matted frames I bought at Michael’s.  Very budget conscious artwork.

Some of my storage.  The snap storage jars was an old spice rack that I had.  It was a stained wood, so I primed and painted it cream.  It needs another coat, but it’s fine for now.  The hardest part was getting the spice labels off the caps.  It does it’s job very well!

You can’t see it here, but there are French doors coming into the room, and they have glass on them.  They were not ordered with glass.  What a shock to find out that…YET AGAIN!!…something was received wrong.  I specifically remember telling him I wanted solid 6 panel doors.  I wanted privacy for our guests, so plain glass was not on the docket.  I also can’t put a curtain above the door since there isn’t even room for a full casing above the door.  I found this stained glass window film at Lowes that I intend to put on it.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like I wanted it to look, so maybe I’ll come up with something else.

I still need to do a few things in this room, but it is pretty much complete now.  I need curtains for the windows and I need to figure out what to do for privacy with the door.  I really like how it turned out though.  I had definitely met my “wants” for the space. 🙂