The Rec Room! At Last!

I've been promising to do this since Thursday. Sorry I'm so late! Here are the pictures of our rec room, starting (as I always do) with the "before" shots, so you can appreciate just how far we've come...

So much ugliness: between the awful wallpaper and the weird door at the foot of the stairs, it's just one big mess of Tacky! And that's before you even enter the actual room!

Awful, dark wood paneling. Ugh. And plywood nailed over the hearth for no good reason (we're guessing they were going to tile over it, but we don't really know for sure...).

The whole dark effect. And this is during day time with a flash!

Ugly furniture that was left behind. Notice you can't quite see into the corners because it's so dark.

Why would you want this speckled pattern on the floor? I couldn't begin to tell you...

Looking into the tiny room off the rec room. Dark, dark, dark, dark, dark.

And then, my favorite: this little cave thing you had to crawl back into to reach the fuse box. Lovely.

So those were the Before Pictures. Now we move onto some of the recent processes (since I'd given you updates earlier, I won't repeat all that):

A little over a week ago, Craig finished the closets which will be used for toy storage. Which meant we had to sort out all the toys in order to put them in the closet. So this was how we spent our actual anniversary. Cheers!

(How did our kids get so many toys???)

With the final product being a closet whose insides look like this. Beautiful.
And we could fit my little freezer inside, too, which made me happy!

We had to have everything taken out of the room for the carpet to be put down, so most of it ended up in Lucky's future room. It got very crowded in there with: a changing table, a desk, a bookshelf, a glider, a la-z-boy, a dresser, two nightstands, a box spring, and a love sac. Whew! I'm just glad we weren't trying to fit a baby in there, too, or it could have been really bad!

Everything off the floor, and Craig vacuumed and mopped several times.
I love the whole "desk on the hearth" look. Nice.

This is our bedroom, minus the awful carpet that's been there since we moved in, and after Craig and I both spent hours scrubbing the floor. It seemed like such a shame to cover up such lovely hardwood flooring, but I really do prefer a soft carpet under my feet when I get up in the morning...

Craig and I slept in the living room that night. The kids thought it was great fun!

And now, the Finished Product:

We were so excited we just had to lay on the soft, clean new carpet.
Bentley's newest favorite game is to just roll across the room on it...

The kids enjoy playing on it. So soft!

A close-up of the actual carpet.

And now, with furniture!

The other side of the room, from the same angle. Notice how light it is, even with the blinds mostly down. Heaven.

Looking back towards the stairs and the crawl space.

The back room, which can now be used as a bedroom when needed, and will mostly be for storing toys.

The closets, with the door on the left opening to the fuse box (no more cave!).

There's now a hallway that leads to the laundry area and the back room. This is a change from before-- you used to have to walk through the back room to get to the laundry room, which was inconvenient for doing laundry AND for having people stay there. And just kind of stupid all around. No more.
And I love the curved carpet that leads into the other room.

So that's our downstairs now! I love it. So very much. Everything about it makes me happy.

But it's really much better in person-- you should come over and see for yourself! If you're coming from out of town, we now have a nice, private room where you can sleep!