Basement Before and After

Looking through the "before" and "during" shots of the kitchen put me in the mood to revisit our recent basement renovation. We're pretty lucky because the basement is large, has a full sized window and a full door out to the back patio an pool. When we moved in it was painted battleship grey with mustard yellow sponge-paining, had grey speckled wall-to-wall carpet and dank old drop tile ceiling. All in all, it seemed like a dungeon and smelled musty. We cleaned the carpet, repainted aqua (bad choice) and tried to ignore it.

After living in the house a couple of years we realized that we used the space more than we'd expected - our desks were there, the washer and dryer were there, we walked through it constantly in the summer to get to the powder room, to bring things down from the kitchen, etc. At least the carpet had to go. And so it did.... revealing 1950's bowling alley tile:

Once again, I was on my knees prying up tile (that's a scrap of the nasty carpet under the book shelf on the left).
Finally, it was gone!
We repainted the walls Ralph Lauren "Studio Cream" RL Number: UL01 from the "Urban Loft" collection (ironic) and selected the new flooring.

You can seen the new drop ceiling tiles too. They're a product from Ceilume that is sound baffled and fire rated. They're also very light so we can easily get to all our water shut off lines and wiring. Et voila: