A Little Bit Goes a Long Way

Slowly but surely this basement is coming along. We haven’t put any walls up yet, but we took some down and really cleaned the place up, and that improved the look already. No offense to any wood paneling lovers out there, but I hate the stuff. And that dark path down to the basement wasn’t a journey I enjoyed taking. So here’s the before photo (I didn’t want you to miss the paneling, so I circled it for you):

 

And the in-progress photo (the cinder block cell of a shower actually came in handy here…easy storage as we ripped stuff out):

 

                               

And finally, the after! Look, I can see all the way to my laundry room…

                     

(I wonder why “Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” just came into my mind.)

I’m just so excited about all of the possibilities now! While I love the open feel, we can’t just leave it like that. People will be showering in there, and I don’t think they’d be up for giving everyone in the living room a show every time they got out. So the options are putting up another wall (no paneling this time), which would close off the space again; putting up a wall of curtain panels that could be left open when we want an airy feel; or Super-Secret Option C, which we haven’t come up with yet. (By the way, regardless of which option we choose, we will be making the space under the stairs a closet, so it won't be that open.)

Personally, I’m leaning toward the curtain panels. Something like this:

 

But I haven’t heard suggestions for Super-Secret Option C yet, so I’m not going to rule that out. Any ideas?

On Another Note

Oh, and as promised in my last post, here are the photos of our beautiful new backsplash. Here's a side-by-side before and after:

And a close up:

And one more view:

We have a tiny kitchen, so we didn't have to do much--just that one wall (the other one is lined with appliances and a pantry). I can't imagine doing much more though. Grouting in between teeny-tiny tiles is back-breaking work! But it was so worth it. This little project cost just over $150--not bad considering the drastic change it made to our otherwise bland kitchen. Special thanks to our friend AJ for helping us put the tile up!