Nine-Twenty Four: Basement Bedroom/Office

We have a partially finished basement. The unfinished half is laundry with a large crawl space that we use for storage-it's perfect for holiday decorations. The finished half has a corner that is set p as an office, but the rest of it has always been kind of a catch-all. We've had several ideas for it, but have never followed through. When we decided to list, we knew it needed to be, at least, cleaned out.

While on vacation this spring, we saw a few ideas that sparked our attention. I turned to Pinterest and that was all it took. The one issue with our house is lack of bedroom space. There are two bedrooms on the second floor, but one of them is very small. We decided to set the finished basement up as a bedroom along with an office area. Everyone who has seen it has said a teenager would love this room-it's away from the others, so a bit more private.

This room had a few issues that we needed to fix-the first being the lighting. There is adequate lighting, but the lighting above the desk area is dropped lighting that has pipes-not much we can do to change that. It was covered with clear lighting tiles, which was fine except every time we had to change the bulbs (and sometimes just for no reason), the tiles would fall and when we tried to replace them would break. We got new ones, but they just wouldn't stay in place. So, it became one of those issues that we decided wasn't worth the trouble. We left them open, and they looked horrible.

This was the "open look":

My hubby used his engineer genius-ness and came up with a way to fix them (one of those "why didn't I do this ten years ago?" things)-adding trim to hold the tiles in place.

During:

Once that little project was done, we could move on to the two smaller lights-same idea as the large one minus the pipes). Tiles would need to be cut. Problem was every time we tried cutting them, they would shred. We ended up rebuilding our back deck (post coming soon), so I asked our fabulous carpenters if they could cut them with their saw-they did it in about 30 seconds and they fit like a charm!

The next issue was our electrical box. It was ugly and I needed to find a way to cover it. Pinterest to the rescue! What did we do before Pinterest?

This was the box with the "door" with missing trim that falls every time you open it:

Here it is once I removed the door:

I picked up some curtain rods and faux silk panels from Target and got to work on my next project!

Ahhh...much better!

I also hung rods & panels on the wall the bed would be against for a headboard effect. I kept the same gray palette going as far as bedding and added in pink accents instead of plum. Our other daughter will be using the bed, bedding, and accents in her new room.

Bedding, throw, throw pillow, nightstand, lamp, starburst mirror-all from Target. My daughter had the body pillow which unintentionally matched the throw exactly.

The worst part of this room was clearing it out. There was so much random stuff- I packed a lot of it, threw out some, and donated the rest. I'm so happy with the result, though. Our realtor was shocked when we showed him (he saw the before)-he actually told us we should give classes on how to prepare homes for sale!

The final issue with this area was tiny basement window. There is only one, so I wanted to make the space as bright as possible. Pinterest again! This little trick was to hang an inexpensive door mirror directly under the window to give the illusion of a larger window.

Here is the window before:

Here it is with the mirror hung underneath:

And here it is with the curtains hung. It's hard to tell in the picture, but when you walk down the stairs, it really does give the illusion of a larger window. And, of course, you can't see the sides of the mirror with the curtains.