A Vintage Basement

We recently gave our vintage basement (circa, 1928 to be exact) a glow up. Did I use that term correctly? I don’t even know. But I did recently get to do a fit check with our teen so feeling very in lately. Anyway, I am sure I have shared that we were constantly hemming and hawing over redoing the basement. I loved the color, but it felt like we needed to move the basement from our kids’ younger years to be more in line with the current needs of our family.

It was also so very tempting to try to make it light and bright. I do love light and bright. That said… Some things can be transformed and some things just are what they are. Our 1920’s basement is the latter. And, I just wasn’t invested enough in some miraculous transformation to have people doing major construction down there. Should we get new carpet? Should we paint? New hardware? Find a solution to the exposed ceiling? As I was getting quotes, it was allllllll adding up, even for these seemingly small improvements.

I think at some point we decided to maybe just paint. And then I sent some inspiration photos to Raj and the ball was rolling. Before I knew it, he came home with a car full of slatted wall panels from the inspo pics and put them up. He also started prepping the walls. A quick trip to the hardware store to pick a paint color (I know- who am I? We chose it and bought it all in the same trip). And we were off and running. Luckily, our painter had availability so he got on the schedule to do the ceiling and doors.

I know that people say that paint makes such a difference, but paint makes such a difference. All of the sudden, our carpet didn’t look as bad. Our hardware actually looked sort of vibe-y… what?! Our ceiling looked less dingy.

A Vintage Basement BEFORE

Here are some BEFORE photos.

A Vintage Basement AFTER

And here are the AFTER photos. You can see that A LOT has stayed the same but the changes made were impactful.

We have tried several different layout configurations in the basement, and the new/old one has always been my favorite. We don’t have a midcentury house, but I love throwing a little midcentury in nonetheless (see this post).

Vintage Basement Games

I love that there are several areas and a variety of things to do despite the small space. We have a living/movie watching area, ping pong table (this was of the utmost importance), an indoor hoop, a gaming center, and a couple of arcade games. Oh, and we can’t forget boccerball. And 8-tracks if you have a player (we do, of course).