A Change in Plans for the Basement Walls

If you've been following along on the longest basement renovation project of all time, you may recall that the last pictures I shared of our basement were of freshly dry-walled, primed, and painted walls. The top half of the walls were painted in Benjamin Moore's Silver Satin, and the bottom half of the walls were painted in Benjamin Moore's Simply White. At the time I was pretty dead set on having board and batten style wainscoting all throughout the basement.

Ahem. Change of plans.

The sudden change of plans happened when I submitted a photo of our fireplace to the lovely Layla at The Lettered Cottage. I was really hoping she could work some of her Photoshop magic to help me visualize how we could create a mantle surrounding a freestanding wood-look stove (you can read the post about that dilemma here).

Layla's Photoshop mock up was pretty awesome. She threw me for quite the loop though because I was not expecting either of her main suggestions! She suggested that instead of making a traditional mantle we use vertical paneling on the whole fireplace surround. She also suggested that we ditch the wainscoting for fully painted walls to make the basement appear taller.

{Check out the before and after inspiration pictures here in Layla's Pick My Presto post. So fun!}

It was hilarious when Alex read Layla's suggestions. He pretty much did the biggest happy-I-told-you-so-dance I've ever seen. You see, with so much finishing work still left to do in the basement, he was really overwhelmed with the idea of adding a huge wainscoting project to the list. It's also not the easiest space to work in since there are posts to work around, about ten thousand outlets and speaker holes to allow for, and lots of inconsistencies in wall depths and heights. 

So, as soon as he heard these words utter my lips, "Hmmmm, maybe Layla is right", he ran downstairs and repainted the basement walls before I could blink. What a guy.

Now we have all of the walls painted in Silver Satin by Benjamin Moore. 

Here is a most recent progress picture:

I'm absolutely loving how things are coming together. Now, I most definitely need to come back and explain why I haven't shared more basement progress pictures (ahem, floors!?! ahem, trim!?!? ahem, frosted french doors1?!?).

I also plan to share a few more changes we've made to our original plan in order to simplify things and, well, speed 'em up a little too!

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In other news, the things my little stinker says / does are becoming more and more hilarious by the day. I know everyone says this about their kids but man, he is such a funny little character! And if you couldn't tell from the picture, he has been taking his pirate duties very seriously these days.

L8R SK8R.

I have no idea why I just wrote that. ;)