Here we are…finally at the end.  All we have to do now is decorative touches, so the walls need some lovin’ yet.  I generally like to buy things piecemeal.  That way, I find the “right” pieces at the right prices.  It might be a bit before I find everything to really finish the rooms.

Here we are at the bottom of the stairs…exciting right? 

Straight ahead is the excercise room…that has actually seen some exercise.  Not overly exciting.  Pretty bare walls and a foam floor.  We have had the elliptical and Bowflex for years, but they have been rather unloved in recent years.  The little flatscreen is a new acquisition.  Hopefully we can watch something interesting while working off all that beer we drank with our friends during construction. 

Next we are turning right and see the lovely bathroom and two storage closets.   The big one is the “Christmas Closet”, as that is how much stuff I have for decorating for Christmas.  Well, it’s not quite full of just Christmas stuff…yet.  We still have some bins up in the garage attic that need to be moved.  Then it will be full.

Take another right turn and we are going down the hall to the wine cellar and our entertaining room.  The flooring here is cork, so it is nice and warm and sound dampening.  I can only image how loud that wine cellar cooling unit would be if it were tile here. 😯

Our entertaining space!  The floor is a 16 inch tile layed on a diagonal.  The motifs on the walls are ones that I drew on heavy plastic, cut out, taped to the wall and painted with a copper paint.  Not too hard, just hard to photograph.  The french doors off to the side lead into my craftroom.

We have a countertop height table with bench and stool seating.  Brian found it on clearance and then we just had to buy some matching stools for it.  It’s really comfortable and washable.  I believe the bench seating is pleather, but the stools are leather.  Having it up higher is rather nice, since our tile in this area is not heated.  It’s a bit chilly.  This keeps your feet off the ground just far enough so they can stay warmer. 

The original lookout windows behind the table looks into our backyard…underneath the deck.  The designer for this house was a freakin’ genious in how he laid everthing out.  Having the one big window in the space be hidden underneath a deck is just brilliant planning.

Inside of the wine cellar (showed that picture previously).  We put cedar casing around the door (you can see it below off the wet bar), because of a flub-up with the trim order.  Yeah…you’re shocked right??  Ah well, the cedar matches the door, so the error for this part worked out fine.  It looks nice like this, and you can tell this is a “special” room since it is trimmed out different.   We ended up putting a humidifier in there.  We tried to put a little fountain in it, and while she was quite pretty, all the water ended up on the floor. 

This is our wet bar next to the wine cellar.  We have a beverage fridge and a two drawer dishwasher.  Underneath the cabinets are a whole lot of wine glass storage.  We wanted these cabinets higher, so the wine glasses had room to hang if we had lots of stuff on the countertop, which happens when we entertain down here.  The countertop is Silestone Quartz.  We had to order the more expensive version because of a flub-up with the cabinet ordering.  Lots of flub-ups in this basement due to rather poor customer service and people that apparently don’t know how to do their job.  It was quite annoying and maddening.  The Home Depot is not my favorite anymore after all the things they screwed up.

Then here is our lovely furnace-rated stone fireplace.  In keeping with a rustic type of feel that we wanted down here, we did a random stone layout on it.  The mantle is a solid piece of limestone with a rough cut on the edges, so it isn’t perfectly smooth and beveled.  We chose to get the fireplace in an upgraded version so it could really pump out the heat to a bigger area.  This is a basement afterall.  It can warm up the room in no time flat.  It’s very pretty, too. 

We bought the chairs last week, but we need a rug and some reading lights yet.  The big chair is a chair and a half and is microfiber.  Super comfy.  The other chair is leather and tapestry and it is a recliner.  That one was on clearance and barely fit in the Acadia when we brought it home.  This will be a good place to curl up and read a book in front of the fire.  Now we have several places to curl up and read! 🙂 

So there you have it.  The finished basement!