Blank Canvas

The only picture from our old basement of beer gone wild

In November of 2005, we stumbled upon a house that had been vacant for over a year.  Initially, we were looking for a house in the Forest Hills district closer to my daughter's school, but we were also outgrowing our first house.  Our old basement was so full of baby clothes, baby strollers, baby toys, and baby paraphernalia that there was no longer room to play ping pong on the table I'd bought a few years earlier.  So when we toured through this vacant house that had a huge yard (a potential garden for my wife) and a huge basement with tons of storage, I knew I was hooked.

We moved in during Christmas of 2005, and I snapped a few of these pictures of this blank canvas of a basement.


The north half of the basement.  Because of the square nature of the room, I picked this side to be the Home Theatre/Media Room.



The back end of the Media Room.  The Stairwell divides the space in half.



The South Room.   It's more rectangular in shape, which I thought would accommodate the ping pong table.  Now known as the Game Room/Bar Room.

The walls in this room were a very strange textured drywall that locked in together against 2x4 studs.  It's as if drywall came with a wallpaper finish on one side.  I had no idea what was behind the walls -- was it cement brick, poured concrete, insulation?  The carpet was grey and had multiple stains that I couldn't get out with a steam cleaner.  The drop ceiling was white, and whoever installed it didn't recess the lights in metal brackets for proper support of their weight.  They simply cut holes in the tiles and dropped them in.  Some of the tiles had a visible sag from the weight of the lights pulling them down.  Basically, I was happy that the basement was partially finished, but I knew I had a lot of work to do in the long run.

The house needed some desperate attention to the exterior roof and interior decorating where we'd be spending most of time.  I figured it would be about 3 years before I could really start focusing on the basement.  In the meantime, I set up the TV in one room and the ping pong table & kegerator in the other.

Phillips 50" Plasma with JBL speakers in 5.1 surround

Old couches and a treadmill face the TV

I envisioned this nook as being a potential spot for a future bar.

The Game Room looking into a small closet where I housed the kegerator.

The ambilight feature on my Phillips plasma HDTV taken with a shutter delay