A man needs his space!

My dad is forever joking that his only space in their house, the house I grew up in, is the 3x6 spot on their bed!  LOL!  This is the spot he goes to after a long day on the golf course, while mom starts and never finishes the millions of projects around the house.  He jokes this way because she is always decorating or updating or cleaning something out.

Hmmmmm...sounds like someone I know;)

So, my goal is to make sure Dave has more than a 3x6 space in our home.  A space he can call his own.  Well, I have some access and right to it, but it's the Man Cave, specially designed for his needs and comfort!

Our basement has been through some changes.  It's been a rolla coaster!!  The biggest thing we've dealt with since we've bought this house is "The Flood"; we talk about it like it was a Biblical event - before "The Flood...." and after "The Flood..."

The water was at least a 1/2 deep down in the laundry room....



The carpet was soaked all the way through our main living area down there.  It was awful.  Thanks to goodness it was covered under insurance.  It's a blessing really, because our sump pump failed, which is a covered event, but there was a coinciding problem too, a huge crack in our foundation - which is not covered.  The sump pump was found first, miracle of all miracles - so the carpet replacement was free.  So awesome!  We fixed the crack in the foundation ourselves with the advice from a lot of different experts - so hopefully any hurricanes that visit us again will not seep into our house!!

So, before our major overhaul of our basement these past few weeks, it looked like this...

Those couches are old as dirt!  They are from my old apartment, given to us from a lady at church, and who knows how old they were then?  Our theme down here is Baltimore, of course, so please excuse the Ravens explosion;)

This was all a mess, surround sound wires, a old tv cabinet, dvds everywhere, yuck....begone!!

We are selling the TV and surround sound, got rid of the cabinet, organized the DVDS, got rid of a ton of games/movies...

Ta da!!  We painted the wall purple.  I know I know...yikes!  It's just this wall as an accent, but the picture doesn't do it justice, it's not really that bright.  Its a nice, bearable deep Ravens purple.  Dave chose it, so don't hate!  We bought this awesome entertainment center from IKEA - only $129 which is a steal!  Dave loves it:)  he loved every moment of putting the thing together too:)

As for the couches...

Ew....are they gross?  This is what they looked like without the covers from O.com.  We sold them for $50 to a few nice boys who are in a band and needed couches for their basement practice space.  I dont know if you can tell in the pic below, but they came in a Scooby Doo painted van, it was pretty awesome!

So we are left with a blank space really.  Brand spanking new carpet, new entertainment center, lots of extra random furniture and junk to get rid of, but Dave is happy happy!

We'll get back to that in a bit....remember what the back room of our basement used to look like?  Maybe you don't because I wrote about it way last year...

It was pretty awful.  We have this gross paneling back there as the wall.  It was ugly brown.

 

Then I painted it white and it looked lots better. Then after that, around a year ago I turned it into a craft room, it was cute and a lot cleaner.

Well, scrap that idea.  That yucky shelf has to go.  We have a chest freezer that has to fit back there now (couponing pays off, but we need space to put food!) and my pantry type cabinet needs to go back there too (again, couponers need a stockpile place!) plus Dave is aching for a mini fridge so he won't even have to leave his Man Cave ever;)

Here he is demo-ing that shelf - see ya!!!

Since I couldn't reach back there to paint that part of the paneling, I needed to catch up!

I don't know what it's so fuzzy but that is how it looks now!  All painted and set up for the time being.  That is our old washer, we are selling it because we bought a brand new set.  It is coming along.  We are actually planning on having someone refinish this whole area and the laundry room.  That back wall needs to be demo-ed down to the concrete to check for leaks, cracks and mold from the flood...it doesn't look wet or gross now, but who knows what may be growing back there?

So here is how the main space looks now.  We bought a 42" TV for Dave to go into our nice entertainment center.  We are selling the treadmill since I am strictly an outdoor runner, it took a year to realize that, and you can see the blue tape on the floor.  We measured out the nice couch we ordered from Gardiners - it's so awesome!  We wanted to make this "fake" outline so we can figure out how to arrange all the other furniture down here while we wait the painful 8 to 12 weeks for the couch to come in.  Some other plans are a DIY bar area and to put the poker table, aka where we dump our laundry sometimes, in a better spot.

It will truly be a Man Cave and I can't wait until it's all done.  I'm totally going to sneak down here to watch movies and cozy up on the nice couch when Dave is at work.  Shhhhh - don't tell him! 

So that is the cause for the blog silence over the past two weeks - we've been really busy cleaning this place out and taking trips to the dump, and Goodwill, and Lowes or Home D.  There is still so much to do but we are chugging along.  It really does take a while to DIY and re decorate just once space!!  Actually, our whole house is getting a clean out and getting ready for lots of updates.  More on that later;)