Underground family room

Well thank you for the lovely comments about our sweet, sweet kitty. You all always make me feel like I have a few hundred extra friends around the world. :)

This post is about a space I’m kind of obsessed with –- the basement. I freakin’ LOVE basements. Something about them – they are just super cool spaces to me. I may have mentioned one or 800 times how excited I am about finishing ours…someday. It’s been eight years of saying “It’s going to happen this year!” and it never happens.

It’s certainly the biggest project we’ll ever do to this house. At first I thought it would be fairly straightforward – frame it up, add a few extra outlets, put up some walls and be done. Easy peasy – pushaw.

As we’ve used the space more over the years, we realize more and more that we’d like to do. (Read: stuff that costs more money.) Like is the key word. If they will happen or not, I have no idea.

Our basement is obviously still unfinished, but as I've mentioned before, we USE it. It’s just too much extra space not to! And although it’s not particularly pretty to look at, I love seeing seldom seen areas in other bloggers’ homes, so I like to share how we use this one. And how we see it working in the future.

I guess I’m saying, you probably won’t be pinning any of these photos. :) But I like to show how we use this typically unusable space.

The layout in our “family room” down there has changed more than any other rooms in our house put together. Because of our very open floor plan, I don’t move furniture around in our rooms…like, ever. They’re set up the way they work. And stay that way. Forever.

So the basement is my fix for when I want to change something up. ;)

Over Christmas break, we made a few changes to the basement family room space to make it even more usable:

This space used to be set up like this:

But we had a whole lotta shifting of furniture that happened when we got our new family room sectional. The old sofa went upstairs to the loft and the two recliners that were there came down here.

We got those recliners about six years ago, and I don’t care for the look of them anymore, but oh man, they are SO COMFY. Dang.

I’ve found three keys to making an unfinished space comfy – warmth (blankets and a space heater if needed), something soft for the tush (loveseat and recliners) and keeping the feet warm (lots and lots of rugs).

Oh, and no spiders. Spiders kind of ruin everything.

(Side note – I once had a serviceman tell me ours was the cleanest unfinished basement he’s ever seen. He couldn’t even find a spider web. I don’t know why we don’t get bugs down here, but we just don’t. Knock. on. wood.)

The TV cabinet is the old one from our family room, the side tables we’ve had for years and the Pottery Barn coffee table was a Craigslist find early last year. It was supposed to go upstairs but it didn’t work. 

The rugs are mostly the really cheapy utility rugs you can find at most hardware stores. We also have a huge one down there that was a remnant and I got it for a steal.

Now that it’s so warm and cozy down there, we find ourselves using this space ALL the time. We don’t really need an extra family room, but it’s there and we want to use it. Eventually it will be a movie room/family room space, and who says you need to have drywall to make it that way?

Not us!

I have a confession…every single night of Christmas break (two weeks people!), we sat our butts on these chairs and had movie nights:

The dog and the Bub usually cuddle up with one of us, or lay on the couch.

It was/is SO FUN.

Nothing matches, nothing is prettied up, but it has been one of our very favorite spots over the past few weeks. Isn’t that crazy?

I like to call it industrial chic:

Ha! That’s totally in, right? ;)

Although we like the way it’s set up now, it’s going to change, AGAIN.

I’ve been doing my workouts down here, (I put sliders on the bottom of the coffee table so I can move it easily – that thing is heavy!) and I keep banging into the chairs and table:

And when we DO finish the basement, we envision an electric fireplace in that alcove where the TV is. (I envision it built into that space so it looks like it’s always been there.)

So the room needs to be oriented the other way, facing the long wall.

That got my wheels turning. Because we are closer than we’ve ever been to actually moving forward with the framing, I want to set up the basement like we want it when it’s finished.

That means my craft space behind those chairs:

Will need to be moved to the back corner by our storage space, where the Bub’s toys are:

And his toys will go into that corner where my stuff currently resides. Got it? :)

My craft area really houses more than just that – it’s all the wrapping supplies, home decor stuff I can’t let go of, extra pantry items and all the seasonal serving dishes and baking stuff.

It will be great because the kiddo has WAY less toys than I do. ;) So there will be a lot less STUFF as soon as you walk down the stairs. My craft room will eventually be part of the storage/work out/laundry room.

That room will have to serve a TON of functions so I want to move everything around to see if my ideas will even work.

I put a little digital layout a few months ago, while daydreaming. :) Even though we haven’t started the work yet, I bide my time by planning. And planning. It helps me hold my horses and it’s something that needs to be done anyway.

Here’s an idea of the way I hope to make it work:

Just as a side note, this is the only part of our home you’ll see a floor plan for. :) I don’t feel comfortable sharing the layout for the other parts of the house, just for security reasons. (Crazy maybe, but I’d rather be crazier than the crazies. You know what I’m sayin’?)

But I know you’ll all be coming along for this ride with us, so this part I will share, because it’s below ground level. :)

Anyhoo, in this layout I still have my craft table off to the side of the family room space, and I now know I don’t want it there. So that space where the blue rug is will get smaller, as that wall will need to come out even further. I was trying to avoid that, but I want to be able to shut the door on all that STUFF.

And you eagle eyes will see where I’m planning on putting the washer and dryer. That’s a whole other post. (Yes, I’ve already done a ton of planning and thinking about that and it’s going to happen if I have anything to do with it. And I do.) ;)

So…there’s our underground family room in all it’s glory. And the start of the beginning of the initial kind of maybe finishing our basement. It has to start somewhere, right?

Do you love moving furniture around? Does you house let you? ;) Do you use floor plans for spaces like me, or do you get a work out and shove everything around till it works? Do you love basements like I do? And most importantly, are you as PYSCHED as I am for it to (maybe?) start soon??

Wahooo!

(And do not hold me to this, I may be saying this exact same thing next year.)