Home Improvement

Our bonus room is about 500 square feet and, along with a full bathroom, it’s the only thing on the second floor. Since there was nothing up there for months, it was easy for me to forget that the room even existed. Weeks would pass without me even going up there! But last week we finished decorating and organizing the room, just in time for Jose’s family to see it when they came for the weekend. To be accurate, I shouldn’t say we “finished” it, since we still have more plans for the room. But it is finished…for the time being.

This is what it looked like when we started — big and beige. It gets a lot of light during the day through the three big windows. We moved Jose’s old couch up there last summer when we got our sectional for the living room, and moved my old coffee table followed when we got a new one for downstairs. (See a theme? The old stuff goes upstairs!)

The white boards are a disassembled bookshelf that one of my coworkers gave us when he was moving out of his house a few months ago.  We also had three large bookshelves that we bought at Ikea earlier this year.  But before we put them together, we wanted to paint.  We chose a nice blue color and got started.

We painted one wall…and then it sat for two months. Oops. Finally we decided two weeks ago to finish it off, so we started AGAIN.

That’s looking much better. We ended up painting two walls, and we do plan to do the rest of the room at some point. But dang — painting always takes way longer than I expect it to! So we decided two walls was enough for now.

We put the bookcases together, but had to wait a day to finish them because we didn’t have proper bolts to secure them to the wall. They’re so tall that I definitely wanted to do that step. The last thing I need is for a 7 foot tall bookcase to come toppling over on me someday.

But finally we were done! And very happy about it.  My dad is getting us a big, framed world map that I plan to hang on the angled wall.  (Dad!  Consider this your reminder!)

We’ve got plans for this wall that include more bookcases (or some built-ins) plus a big TV so that we can bring all the video games up here. That’ll be “stage 2” of the bonus room project. Maybe later this summer…

The freebie bookcase looks good too!

Here’s a photo in natural light. The room is way too dim at night, since the single ceiling light doesn’t do nearly a good enough job at lighting the room. A solution is needed. Hmm.

Yesterday I hung up the first piece of upstairs wall art — a print from Tugboat Printshop called “Explorer Capsule 3000” that I knew Jose would love.

With the bonus room finally in a good state, this weekend we decided to address the foyer.  We were tired of it being a repository for shoes.   Lots and lots of shoes.  And almost all mine, I admit.

I used the shoe racks to make one monster rack in the much more appropriate location of our master closet.

And next to the door we now have a lovely table that we found on clearance at Pier 1 yesterday. This was after going to 6 different stores on Saturday and finding pretty much nothing that interested us! I was just happy we found something we liked, and that was affordable as a bonus.

The table looks kind of Asian, so we decided to hang our woodblock prints from Japan right over it. Hooray! It looks so much better.

I was on a roll after that, so I also cleaned the rest of the master closet and the laundry room.  Small rooms are so much easier to manage.  Next up is the study, which is a mess that I am currently dreading.  But I know it will look so much better when we’re done…