The Bar is open!

Oh wait... we still need to stock it!
We'll have to go here , here and here

Bar is ALMOST DONE!!!

Bar is coming along NICELY!

Although it SEEMS like it is taking forever for us to finish the bar, Mario is making amazing progress seeing as how he only works on the thing during his lunch hours. But the body of the beast is pretty much complete. We painted it Hubbard Squash, one of the colors we mixed to get the wall color. (More on that here) Here's how it looks right now front and back:

We ordered granite for the top that will look like this:

The actual bar top is going to be supported by these corbels (purchased here) that Mario is going to stain to match the wood on all of our furniture (Somewhere between an oak and a cherry if that's possible!):



And we got a fridge for down there too... not full size, but it seems to hold a sufficient amount of beer and various other beverages and ice cream!

Framing is finished!

Belly up to the bar...

Mario stared the framework for the front section of the bar this past week.

Last one down's a rotten egg!

Actually- Last one down doesn't get to sit in the new chair. And that really sucks for them because the new chair is awesome.

Ta Daaa.... TV!

Holy wiring batman!

God bless Mario for knowing how to wire the new TV...

Dust in the wind...

ALMOST DONE!
The floor is in... we just need to paint the foot molding that Mario spent all weekend installing. Here are some shots of the floor. Like the dust motes in the air??

Up next.... FLOOR

Another thing we had a tough time deciding was what to do with the floor. We have A LOT of laminate in the house and I was of the mind that if I had to have one more room in which I was forced to hear the click clack of the dog's nails on it I would lose my mind.

We wanted to acid stain it. (You can learn more about acid staining adn how freaking awesome it looks here and here.) But alas, since the previous owner of our house laid down a thick coat of gloppy grey paint all over the whole floor we would have needed to sandblast the top inch or so off to make it work. It was starting to look just a bit pricey. So then we had decided just to paint it with a few coats of basement paint tinted to Sherwin Williams Library Pewter from thier Arts and Crafts collection. (The ceiling color is actually one can of Library Pewter mixed with two cans of regular white ceiling paint.) Then maybe throw down a coat of polyurethane and see what happened.

But the floor is in pretty bad shape... it looks ok b/c of the fresh coat of paint, but as we have been working down there, chunks of floor are crumbling if we drop something on them. There is a big hole from where we had the support pole moved (which you can see on the right top up above.)

So to make a long story even longer, we decided to take our superbowl winnings and get laminate for the floor. (click clacking dog nails be damned!) We chose Kronotex Swiftlock Heritage Pecan, pictured on the bottom right up above. After trips to two stores today to get as much as we need, it is presently resting for 48 hours to acclimate itself to the loveliness that is our basement!

Getting there....

So aside from getting the sconces in, we also got all the wall color and trim finished this weekend.

Sconces are in!

It's been a busy weekend here in the Aurora Basement.

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition has been in town, they just finished up filming thier season finale at a home about 2 miles from where we live. (I volunteered to help out but never got the call... apparently they needed @ 1,500 volunteers but there were over 5,000. I was hoping to pick up some pointers from the pros for our basement redo! And help out a worthy cause of course.) The whole process has been well documented by our local paper and actually seems liked an AMAZING undertaking. You can read more about it here.

Any way, we were hoping to get maybe 10 of the volunteers who did NOT get chosen to come over and help us out but no dice... so Mario busted his @ss all weekend and I hung out with Syd!

Here are the new sconces... before and after.

ceiling treatment

We went back and forth over what to do with the ceiling... we didn't really have enough headroom to do a drop ceiling, so we ruled that out pretty quickly. We discussed sheet rocking it, but the additional cost was a major factor, as was the worry that we would no longer had access to the pies if we did that. And since we have had a plumber here at least 3 times in the 10 months we have lived here, we figured no access to the pipes was a BAD idea.
So we decided to paint it. We have a friend who painted their ceiling black which we really liked... but they have A LOT more natural light than we do. So we picked this color that turned out much lighter than we thought, but in the end we're really glad it is that light and very happy with the way it turned out.

FInally got some color on the walls!

SO we finally got some color on the walls tonight. Couldn't find a color we really liked so we wound up mixing our two finalists (Hubbard Squash and Roycroft Adobe from Sherwin Williams "Arts and Crafts" line) together and VOILA!