The New House: The Basement

The final installment of the New House Series, featuring the awesome (and really nice and cool--by that I meant actual temperature) downstairs.

 The down bath.  The shower is quite large, which is nice.

 The official food storage area.

 More of the official food storage area.

 The laundry area.  We have some plans of how we can streamline this whole area and make it more functional.  In the meantime, it looks like a disaster 100% of the time.  To help you get a sense of the layout, picture the stairs in your head again.  When you get to the bottom of the stairs and look to your right, you see this laundry area.  If you look straight ahead you see the door to the bathroom and the food storage areas.  You also see the furnace and AC.  If you look to your left, you see the toy room pictured below.

 Toy room.  The carpet is from the 80s, but it looks like it has never been walked on, plus it is nice and thick.  Eventually we want to replace all the blue carpet upstairs with brown, but we don't plan on doing much with the basement for a very, very long time.  We are so grateful that the house was move-in ready and while the whole house needs a coat of paint, there isn't anything that has to be fixed or done immediately.

 The other half of the toy room.  The previous owner left us the stove (and washer and dryer).  This is plumbed to be a kitchenette and we do want to put a sink down here sometime.  I hope to do a lot of bottling down here.

Officially, though, this is the art room.  We are going to put a table down here and all the kids' copious amounts of crafting can be done somewhere other than my dining room table.  AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 View of the art room from the far end of the toy room.

 This picture isn't very useful.  It is the under the stairs storage that was made really quite nice, with a light.  We have all the camping stuff in there.

 The toy room from the far end of the art room.

 The bonus room? We've been calling it the storage room.  This was a bedroom in the original house.  The previous owner used it for storage, and we plan on doing the same.  There is no reason it couldn't be used as a bedroom.  It wouldn't meet the official requirements because that window has been covered up on the outside, but there is a closet.

 We plan on building some nice shelving.  Right now, we stuck in what storage items we could find and its primary function is extra-large linen closet.

 You can see the door to the storage room directly opposite the washer and dryer.  The other door opens into one of my favorite parts of the house--the children's quarters.

 We call this open section The Commons.  Mom gave us her love seat (they just bought new furniture), which fits perfectly along the wall of the commons.

 What???  Andrea allowed a TV in her home?????????????  What is the world coming to???????????  The TV was a donation from my bro-in-law, Sterling.  He saw it at the dump and thought it might be good to have.  Then my sister told him that it was too big to take to Miami, and we wound up with it.  Timothy is very excited.  :)  I was going to say no way, Jose, but then I remembered how much I miss my karaoke machine and changed my mind.  However, this thing is here on a probationary basis, and at any time it might find itself back at the dump from which it came.

 The Commons leads to three bedrooms.

 Miriam's is the smallest but she gets it all to herself.

 She also got Grandma Olive's desk.  Thanks again, Mom!!!

 The girls' room is also the "guest bedroom."  We put a queen size bed in there to lure visitors to our house.

 The closet is amazing.  The closet floor is cedar.

 The boys' room.  It is also quite spacious.  When Oskar moves down we'll put the bunk beds together as bunks and get Cowen a full-size bed.

The closet in the boys' room is also very nice.  It houses the hand-me-down church clothes.

That, my friends, is the end of the tour.  I'd much rather you saw it in person so I can describe--in minute detail--my decorating plans.  It will take about twenty years to get it all looking how I want, but it will be splendid.  Also, we now have room for visitors.  So visit.

We love our new house!!!!!!!!