basement

Trimming the tree

Posted by matt on Dec 6, 2011 in basement, decor | 0 comments

Well, this past weekend we got our tree from the local Lion’s Club. I let MC pick out the tree, and when we got it home, wouldn’t you know, it was too big. Okay, really it was only a tad big, and there was a tall thin branch poking out the top that we trimmed off. Once that was done, it fit like a glove. There isn’t much to say about the tree, except we had a good time decorating it while watching Garfield’s Christmas special, and a Claymation Christmas featuring the California Raisins (both were Christmas presents from MC to me last year, and they are awesome). I have to give MC all the credit on the tree decorating, it looks great. So here’s our tree, along with some of our favorite ornaments.

An easy new shelf

Posted by matt on Nov 30, 2011 in basement | 0 comments

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving, filled with delicious food, family and a whole lot of relaxing. Ours was just that, and also included a bunch of work around the house, because I get antsy and need something to do. One of the things we just finished was a new shelf above the TV in the basement. The wall was pretty bland, and needed a new touch.

So I went to the local hardware store and picked up an 8′ – 1″x4″ and an 8′ – 1″x2″ for under $6. I cut the boards in half so the shelf would be 4′ long, the same length as our entertainment stand. I used one of the 4′ – 1″x4″ plank as the back, and one as the actual shelf, and a 4′ 1″x2″ as the overhang to create the shelf. I used a countsink drill bit into the back of the back plank to adjoin the bottom and rear planks together, and so the screws wouldn’t be against the wall. I used 2″ finish nails to attach the front overhang to the bottom of the shelf.

Once the shelf was built, I tried to match the stain similar to our entertainment stand, but had no such luck. So I headed over to sherwin williams and was able to match the color with paint. Two coats later, the shelf was perfect. I simply counter sunk three screws into studs in the wall, and boom, the shelf was up.

I had bought some extra wood as well, and may build a few smaller but similar shelves to go next to this one. We haven’t decided on it quite yet, but it nice to have some extra shelf space in the basement. It has since been filled with christmas decorations. That should be no surprise.

The Hall of Music

Posted by matt on Sep 8, 2011 in basement | 0 comments

News flash, I used to be in a band. Actually, I used to be in many bands, for a very long time. It was a good time, full of lots of memories and ridiculous stories. Anyway, I have since stopped playing in bands for many MANY reasons, but mostly because I got older and my body, along with my sleep cycle, won’t allow it anymore.

All that being said, I have always been a sentimental fool when it comes to my old bands. I have kept nearly every set list, every photo, every video and any other random piece of memorabilia that existed. So, I wanted to incorporate this into our house somewhere, but hadn’t quite found the right spot…until now.

We have slowly made our basement family room into more of a hangout spot, full of fun and quirky things. There’s the Monopoly posters, a ceramic Redskin player that my mom painted in the 70′s, and now the music wall.

I like walking past this everyday, it makes me smile. Maybe it’s the memories, or maybe it’s the all to real bobble-head that MC had made for me last year. Plus, this gives me easy access to my bass, when I do feel the need to play and run through an old set list, if I can remember how the songs went.

I’ll go through the old archives over the next few months and see what I dig up, and what will be added to the wall. Chances are I’ll put up an old set list, a Ticketmaster ticket that had our band’s name on it and some photos. Good thing the wall isn’t that big, or else it would be cluttered with a lot of that stuff. This will probably be an evolving wall, full of randomness. Here’s another shot, right before we put up the bobble-head.

Passing Go

Posted by matt on Jul 29, 2011 in basement | 2 comments

I’m a nerd. I’ve never been shy about saying that. When we bought our home, one of the first things I wanted to do was find some posters I saw way back when and put them in our basement. No big deal right? So what were the posters of, and how did this come to be? Well, here:

That’s right, Monopoly posters of Boardwalk and Park Place. I first saw these on an episode of MTV Cribs. Yeah, don’t judge me, I was bored and chowing down on a bag of cheetos when they did a profile of Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s house, and in one of his rooms were these posters. I loved them, and I have always wanted to find them. The problem, they don’t exist, at least no where that I was looking. My good friend Josh (who also helped me with the tile in the half bath) happens to work at a screen printing shop, and wouldn’t you know, he can accept illustrator files and print them out. He told me he’d be happy to help me out with any custom prints, so I mocked up these beauties in illustrator one afternoon and sent them over to him. He printed them on some foamcore for me at 22″x28″ and I found some decent frames at target.

Once I got them all framed and ready to go, it was just a matter of finding a decent space for them. We have this little nook area in our basement that we really wanted to utilize for bookshelves. The more we thought about it, we thought it would be neat (and more functional) to put a small pub table in there. After countless attempts to find the right size, we were walking through Bed, Bath and Beyond and saw this table. With a 20% off coupon in hand, we picked it up for a great price.  We’re slowly making our basement a comfortable hang out spot, something we really didn’t have in the old apartment.

I’m really happy with how it all looks. It makes me smile everytime I go to the basement. Plus, I should mention that on one of our first dates, MC and I ended up playing monopoly with her friends Anne and Court, so these posters remind me of when we first met. Good times. And in case you are wondering about bobble heads, well that’s a whole different story (again, I’m a nerd).

Fireplace Mantel

Posted by matt on May 31, 2011 in basement | 0 comments

When we bought the house, one of the first things we said we wanted to do was add a mantel around the fireplace. The room just looked so bland and blah without it, besides, where are we going to hang the stocking come Christmas time.

There is nothing MC loves more than decorating for Christmas, so I knew I had a deadline to find and install a mantel. I started looking on craigslist to see if I could find a mantel with some not so ordinary measurements. After weeks of searching I thought I would have to bite the bullet and shell out at least $200 for a new mantel and hope that it would fit. At just about that time, I found an ad on craigslist that was trying to get rid of their mantel for a whopping $25. Yeah, twenty-five. At first I thought this was a typo since everyone else was selling it for at least $125, so I responded to the ad and sure enough, it was only $25. I got my excitement in check  almost knowing that this was too good to be true, it seems to be the right size but what if I measured wrong. At worst, I’d be out $25, which I was willing to accept. I drove over and picked up the mantel, it fit to the inch into my Element (a sign, I thought), and brought it home. The couple I picked it up from were awesome, they were building a new mantel and just wanted to get rid of this…and they had a dog named Yoda, so again…a sign. It needed a new coat of paint, and nails to be removed, but I was amazed to find out it fit PERFECTLY.

Last weekend, I finally went to town cutting off the slanted and banged up bottoms (which I had to cut twice due to a wrong measurement) and MC and I put a fresh new coat of our favorite “polar bear” white Behr paint. Once it was dry, I took a few finish nails and got that sucker onto the wall.

There was one SLIGHT problem I didn’t expect though, and that was a small gap between the wall and the mantel. Why didn’t I notice this before, its because I had to sand that area down due to some caulk that was on there before, and well, I over sanded.

So I took some foam filler and sprayed it in the crack to seal up that gap. Once the filler had dried I did a fresh coat of caulk around the whole mantel to seal it up nicely.There was also one other SLIGHT problem. The firebox slate wasn’t flush to the mantel. My father in law called this the reveal, and so I assumed it wasn’t flush so that you could put some tile on the slate to jazz it up and make it flush. Well, I’m more rock n’ roll than jazz, so I took it upon myself to find a new solution. I took the same trim I used in the kitchen and used it on the underside of the mantel. Now everything is flush, sealed, and just about done. I need to paint the areas of the trim that I had to nail, but aside from that, it’s done. I’ll admit, it’s not 100% perfect, but unless you look really hard, you won’t notice the slight imperfections. Besides, it was $25, and it’s awesome.

the Workbench

Posted by matt on Mar 22, 2011 in basement | 0 comments

I have always wanted a workbench. My dad had one in our basement, and he would always go down there to build new things, fix our toys or help us with class projects. It was a place where you could create or fix just about anything, and I knew that when we bought a house, I wanted to build one of my own. One of the first houses we actually looked at long before we settled on this house had a work bench built in, and I have to admit, it was a selling point for me. Had the rest of the house been a bit better, I would have made a harder push, but it really did fall flat. Anywho, when we looked at our current house, the utility room in the basement was huge, and had potential for a workbench.

And so, after pleading with my wife, she kindly allowed me to build a workbench. Huzzah! However, I needed a better spot of the workbench. So, here I am (above) standing in a doorway that was in a really bad place. It was my call to move the doorway all the way to the left, against the wall, and put the workbench basically where I am standing right now. Then, I can pull down those awful lights and move the peg board to where I can actually use it.

Now I’ll admit, I don’t know how to build anything. I have rarely used a saw, I couldn’t tell you even what type of saw I would need, and I really had no idea there were so many different types of wood. Not a great start, but alas, thanks to the wide world web, I was able to track down a whole bunch of website dedicated to people like me, and instructions on how to build a work bench. I got my list of parts and headed over to home depot. Again, not knowing what I was doing, I found some great employees that walked me through exactly what I would need, and even cut some of the wood to more manageable pieces for me. I didn’t have them cut it to what I specifically needed because I wanted to do as much on my own as I could. Why? Well, my theory was simple, if I couldn’t build a work bench, I shouldn’t try build anything else. Now with all the wood transferred from the Element to the back yard, I had one small problem, what was I going to cut the wood on? I’d need a workbench for that, but alas, that’s what I am building. I had picked up two saw horses at home depot as well, and taken the old door I just had removed and used it as a make shift table out back. Pair all that with a table mate like vice that my father gave me, and I was all set.

With my dad’s circular saw all ready to go, I marked my first cut, hit the trigger and gave it a slice (insert buzzing sound here). What I didn’t realize was that the saw wasn’t going to cut through this 4×4 in one cut, like I thought. I had to flip it over 4 times just to get one solid cut, and I had 4 legs to do, so that was 16 cuts per leg, and trying to get them perfect, well, that wasn’t so easy. Alas, I forged ahead and made all my cuts, stacked my wood and marked each for their location.

I hauled everything inside so that I could assemble the table where it would actually reside. Following the instructions as carefully as I could, I began to assemble the legs of the table.

Once I had all the legs done, I flipped them onto the table top, screwed it all together until everything was attached. Now, all I had to do was flip it right side up, glue the hardboard on top and let it sit overnight. “No problem, let me just pull from back here….uhhhh…oh no, it weighs a ton. Crap.” Well, my stubbornness wasn’t about to let this table defeat me, so I muscled up and after struggling for a while, was finally able to flip it right side up and only pulled a few muscles in my back. Once up, and in place, I pushed it against the wall, put the hardboard ontop with the glue, and put some weight on it to sit overnight.

Sorry for the blurry picture, I wasn’t able to stand still at this point. The next day, I cam back and was able to put the finishing touches on it, adding the peg board behind the table, laying the carpet back down, and putting everything it its rightful place.

And in case you were wondering, where I am standing now is where the peg board was in the original photo, and where the orange extension cord is hanging, is the original doorway I was standing in. So, now I have my work bench, and I am ready to move onto the next project, whatever that may be.