Tonight I handed in a midterm that took me most of last week to complete. We had to work in just two 48 hour blocks of time, so I spent way too many hours sitting at a desk last week. Thankfully, I now have a pretty home office to enjoy 🙂

I am so thankful we decided to get extra long desks, for when I have to do this.

You see that? A laptop, an open book, an open giant binder, room to write, a closed book and loads of open space!

I also realized that I never shared when I bought this West Elm bathroom cup to use as my mostly Sharpie, pencil holder.

The office isn’t finished yet, we still have lots of little details and storage to add. But it works wonderfully, and I can attest from hours and hours on my arse that the chairs are super comfy. We will probably add finishing touches to this room gradually, since we are currently hooked on this monster.

This was my view from sitting at my desk. Two weekends ago, we managed to prime the lower half of the walls. We decided to paint the lower half before adding the picture frame part of the molding, so that we can just easily roll paint on without worrying about nooks and crannies right now. Looking at this for hours had me itching to get some semi-gloss paint up there! Maybe my carpal tunnel will heal and we can get at least the downstairs done soon!

Since Mike has finally introduced the basement, I figured I’d show you a little of our plans for it. We just started to actually have a clue of what we want it to be (other than AWESOME). It started with this floorplan.

Mike doodled this one Saturday night when we were out to eat. I carry around a little pocket sized notebook to jot down blog ideas and whatnot. So when I wasn’t understanding Mike’s idea, he drew this.

I often say how I completely trust Mike’s ideas and well, his sense of style. I would seriously trust him to go to the mall and pick out an outfit for me right this second. I don’t take his suggestions lightly, in fact, I take most of his suggestions very seriously. Though when the situation is reversed, I usually have to talk him into things 🙂

So Mike came up with this floor plan that I probably wouldn’t have thought of and now I had basement on the brain. Sometimes it just takes that one little aspect to come together to finally be able to visualize a space that you have been completely idealess about. Since most of my inspiration comes from HGTV, it’s no surprise that the Dream Home episode brought about another revelation.

Light walls and light floors. Two different concepts for me 🙂

I am also in love with the open shelving in this mini-kitchen/bar area.

All Mike and I really knew about the basement, besides what we wanted to use it for, was that we didn’t want it to look like a basement. I also don’t want it to be dark (besides our theater area). We’re fortunate to have large windows and high ceilings throughout most of our basement and I don’t want to ruin that. The light floor concept came into play when we decided that we’d like to move our litter boxes down there. We use the all-natural (and wonderful!) Feline Pine litter. It is literally finely ground wood chips, which cause me to vacuum our current dark floors at least once a day. It’s very light in weight, and color, and tracks everywhere. It is still much better than that clay stuff that got dust on my floors, in my lungs and stunk horribly! ps- did you know that clay litter supposedly has carcinogens in it? No bueno.

Back to the basement! This week, while we are on a basement kick, Mike sent me a link to none other than HGTV.com and a gallery of basements by Candice Olson. Can this woman ever do wrong? Every time she does a room, even if I hate the color and the furniture, it looks wonderful. Her basements are no exception, so here’s some eye candy.

They are all completely different but share that put togetherness. They all have classy elements (light fixtures, curtains, built-ins, french doors) that most people wouldn’t bother putting in a basement. We don’t have an exact plan yet, since we’re nowhere near ready to start this project, but we know that we want a similar vibe. We have dreams of french doors, bookcases, back splashes and open shelving. And once we put the pool table in place on Saturday? It was another turning point in the visualization of the basement. Finally, something that will be staying down there, that we can physically walk around and get a feel of the size of the space.

But for now, we’ll just keep dreaming up ideas.

This weekend, Mike and I spent some time outside cleaning up the front yard. It was a rough winter and 3 of our shrubs didn’t make it through. Okay, they were dead last summer but we kept hoping they’d come back to life. A quick clean up turned into digging up things and sore arms and legs, but in the midst of the death I spotted this.

You see that? It’s spring.

And with spring comes the end of the semester crunch, which unfortunately has smacked me in the face this week. I have so many house stories to tell, and my “things to post about list” has been growing and growing, but my carpal tunnel is telling me to quit for the night. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer to me and also Mike will be back at some time this week with another manly post . He said I should rename this blog to Mike’s Lil House That Could with all of the posts he’s been writing. No no, this is still my gig! But I am very thankful that he’s willing to help out around here when I’m drowning in homework 🙂

We haven’t really shown the basement since it is completely unfinished.  We only use it for storage.  However, we did have a nice delivery made on Saturday which happened to make the basement its new home!  But still, the basement remains dark and cold.  We do have plans to one day finish it; I’d say in the next 12 months we’ll start this basement project.

Until then, here are some pictures for everyone to get an idea of what we’re working with!

Here is the view coming down the basement stairs.  Nothing special as you can either go left or go right.  If you go right, you’ll hit mainly our ‘utility’ room with our hot water heater and the like.  We plan on making a portion of this space into a half bathroom.  For our tour, we’ll go left down the stairs.

And this is the view as soon as you turn left.  A decent sized area we hope to close-in with some french doors.  We have an english basement which allows us to have relatively big windows which means plenty of light in this thing.

A better view of those windows!

Here is the view looking down the basement — really really long. This picture doesn’t really do any justice.

And here is the same view just looking back the other way.  On your right hand side, you can just barely see the hot water heater around the corner; this area will eventually be the half bathroom and unfinished storage space.

You’re looking at the space that will become The Theater.

Since this ‘cove’ doesn’t have windows (and thus naturally dark), it’s only fitting that this area become a theater.  I haven’t decided if I’ll go LCD/LED/Plasma or go all out with a projector.  But either way, we’re really looking forward to this area.  We hope to do a nice sectional couch and some other unique seating options.

Oh, hey, look… stunt photoshop walls and screen.  I couldn’t resist.  Unfortunately, we’ll have to put a small door towards the right of the screen for access to the sump pump.  Not looking forward to it.

And that is all I have for everyone!  A totally unfinished basement, ta-da!

Oh wait!  There’s more… If you haven’t already figured it out, we received a free pool table over the weekend courtesy of some friends of the family.

No, guys… that doesn’t mean it fell off the back of a truck.  I promise.

All we had to do was pay someone to move it about 50 miles for us!  Totally stoked to put a ping pong table on top of this bad boy, too!  We hope to eventually re-finish the wood, maybe a darker stain, and put on some new felt.  It is going to be a great addition to the basement — as long as Macky doesn’t shred the thing to pieces.

A couple of weeks ago, Mike and I headed to Ikea to check out the Arholma outdoor collection we were thinking of as an inexpensive alternative to my beloved Crate & Barrel set. Sadly, I wasn’t feeling it.

That’s my sad face. Not to be confused with my some dude is circling this couch as I’m trying to pose for a picture for my blog and I feel totally weird about it, face. It’s just very low, the cushions are meh and I just wasn’t feeling the material. I wanted to like because it was affordable, but I don’t even think adding throw pillows would make me like it. I think it would be good for a small patio/city balcony area, but I think the scale would have been off for us.

After this, I figured we’d have to suck it up and go with the West Elm set.

We stopped in there this past weekend to see if they had their outdoor furniture displayed yet. They didn’t, but said they would have it in a few weeks. They asked me what I was looking for and when I said the Wood Slat collection, they told me they had a lounger in the corner I could look at to get an idea. I excitedly ran over only to realize I had walked by it minutes before, but I didn’t notice that it was what I was looking for because it looked black. I really want a nice wood tone to go with our upcoming stamped concrete patio. Whaaaamp whaaaamp #2.

So I was back to the drawing board. Then our friend Robin informed me that Pier 1 had a set similar to the Crate & Barrel/Ikea one.

We also went to look it and though it was still low, it was a step up in quality from the Ikea set and could work. But the table only sat 4 people so we’d still have to find one of those.

I’m feeling a little defeated at this point and I think I’ve lost track a little bit of what we want. Though I love the Crate & Barrel Ventura set, I think I need to stop trying to replicate it and just find something else that I like. So I revisited some sites with zero expectations, as if I was starting from the beginning. I was strangely attracted to the Target Belmont Collection, even though I have seen it and even posted this picture before.

I’m still not in love with this conversation set, but I think it may just be how the picture is staged. I looked at some of the other pieces and I really like them.

I think I wasn’t sold on this furniture the first time around because of a) the conversation set looks a little awkward to me in that first picture and b) the color of the cushions. But before I wanted a West Elm white and navy look, I wanted a bright color. I figure I can still do white and navy throw pillows since the striped pillows pictured here are not included. All of the items in this collection ship for free, except for the armless chair. Just an added bonus to think about…

As I told Mike yesterday, the last thing I want to be picky about is the color of cushions. An affordable price and a good shape/base are much more important to me. I think getting a bold color could be a fun challenge to work with. Margarita green anyone? 🙂