Four weeks ago we shared about the progress in the basement utility room. Since then, I was busy at Spring planting.
With all the warm days and cool nights, our yards have greened up nicely. The trees bloomed and all the perennials came back stronger than ever. The lawn remains nice and green, while all the seedlings came up nicely despite of using old seeds.
Gardening really made the home quarantine a lot easier. I am blessed to have a big space to roam around safely. 10 weeks into the pandemic, neither of us feels anxious or claustrophobic. I still look forward to visiting the mountains and public parks though. But to date, gardening kept me calm.
I did go back to the utility room though. During the rainy days I painted the utility room in our go-to wall color – Sherwin-Williams Extra White (SW 7006):
The closet was painted in “Pale bud”, the same color we used in our upstairs bedroom closets:
The ceiling and laundry nook were also painted in white:
The utility closet will be covered by doors so I did not paint the inside. In fact, we did not even mud the drywall inside the closet:
Building the utility closet is truly a good decision! Not only it enables us to soundproof around the furnace, but also we now have a designated spot for all the unsightly cleaning tools and products.
As soon as the paint dried, we moved onto preparing the slab for floor installation. It was an easy decision to extend the vinyl flooring throughout the basement into the utility room. What we used was a cork-backing vinyl flooring called NuCore, in the color of “Driftwood”.
Installing LVP flooring requires a leveled floor. Moving the floor drain left us a low spot in the utility room. So we used self-leveling concrete to level everything and patch small holes.
After the self-leveling concrete dried overnight, we went around the utility room slab with a scraper to clean up any small bumps, followed by a good vacuum around the room.
Then we put the washer and washer back. Not able to do laundry for a whole month, it felt so good to have the laundry set back and connected!
It was also a nice bonus that they were finally out of the media room now. For weeks, our media room looked like this:
Now the washer and dryer were out, I could not wait to clean up the dust:
I stripped away the floor protector and swept away any debris and dust in the media room. Gotta love a mid-project clean-up!
Based on our experience, a clean floor installation requires a dust-free environment during the installation. Cleaning the neighboring media room prevented the underlayment to attract dust and hair due to static electricity. Using the same method, we expanded the flooring into the utility room:
and all the way inside the closet:
with a smooth transition:
With previous experience it only took us 6 hours for the installation. We worked like a well-oiled machine and had a good time.
Shortly after the flooring was installed, the doors were up! We ordered custom doors to match the profile of the solid basement doors. They came in pre-primed and with trims! After a few cuts on the trims, everything got installed in a day:
A pair of french doors are used for the utility closet to ensure full access to the furnace and water heater.
The door on the under-the-stair closet is a pocket door, which slides inside the wall to save room:
After the sliding doors was installed, I was able to finish painting the boundary between the closet and the utility room:
We did not install trim on the side wall. So the two spaces were separated by a crisp paint line between white and pink:
We also took this opportunity to order and install the pocket door for the master bathroom:
It will be painted white on the bedroom side. And the bathroom side will be painted in a darker color to match the tiles.
The installations of the flooring and the doors happened back to back (crazy, I know), and together they made such a dramatic change to the whole basement! I had imagined many times how this space would feel at this stage. But in reality, uniting the rooms with seamless flooring created a look even better than I anticipated:
It helps the whole space to feel so spacious:
I cannot help but feeling that the utility room – maybe we should give it another name now – deserves to have its own purpose, rather than being merely an extension of the media room.
I have come up a few ideas for the space and as you can see, and I put up some makeshift floating shelves made from scrap materials to try them out.
The taller floating shelf is set at 32″ from the floor. At such height, it can be used to display books and collectibles. It also can be used for laptop or tablet if needed.
I kept it narrow (12″) so it does not protrude from the partial wall next to the opening.
I also made a makeshift low table with two simple storage cubes. It is elevated 18″ from the floor, a perfect height for an adult person when sitting on floor pillows. It can be a spot for chess games, tea time, or serving drinks and food when we have movie nights in the future media room.
Being also 12″ deep, the low table can be tucked underneath the floating shelf, if such unobstructed access between the two rooms is desired.
There you go, our finished utility room, and our almost finished basement! Without unfinished surfaces, our basement feels spacious, clean, quiet, and cool – a perfect spot to chill during summer days. It has quickly become Charlie’s favorite space to stretch out and nap. We moved two dog beds down here already, one in the bedroom for Charlie to sleep after breakfast, and the other in the media room for him to nap in hot afternoons. Charlie is a lucky pup.
The next step is finishing the trims and baseboards – we are getting so close!
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