It was clear what the first project was to be… the office. We relocated to Madison for Eric’s job. I left a great job in Houston to improve our quality of life… but now I had to figure out how to employ myself. So – along with my business partner, I started a geologic consulting company. I would work out of the house. But, seriously… do you think you could work here:
Stinky carpet, painted paneling, drop ceilings, fluorescent lights... oh my!
This is a basement office space. From floor to ceiling, the height of the room measured 6′ 8″. Who knows what lurked in that carpet – smelled a bit like dog. The room was a box. Here’s Eric (~6′ 1″) for scale:
Eric standing in the corner... it'll give you an idea of how much height we actually gained.
So, let the games begin! First, Eric and our friend John went to work on demo. It was pretty exciting to remove that carpet and uncover the ceiling…
Here, Eric models a much cleaner smelling space. Looking better already!
It was nice to see that the walls were insulated and in good shape behind those panels. And the exposed ceiling already added some additional head room. The window in this photo looks out the front of our house, and the wires that you see in the foreground were run down the back wall of the former office. They removed and relocated that wall, as you’ll soon see.
Next, Eric removed the subflooring. His goal was to re-frame the floor at a slightly lower level to increase the height of the room.
As you can now see, there's a bit more headroom with the subfloor removed.
Check out the stylish asbestos floor tiles we uncovered! These tiles directly overlay the poured concrete floor of the basement. This floor has about 6-8″ of relief on it – it’s highest near the foundation walls, and dips down toward a drain in the center of the unfinished part of the basement (which is located to the right of this photo). In the next photo you can see how far the rim joist has to be off the concrete floor in order for the floor to be level.
Framing out the new floor above the asbestos tiles.
Eric re-used the wood that framed the original floor. In order to lower the floor, he scribed the boards down ~3 inches against the profile of the underlying floor before he removed it. This gave him a template with which to trim the pieces so that they would fit back into place.
With the floor joists returned to their respective positions, the new subfloor went in.
Replacing the floor joists.
At this point, before the drywall went up, we had to move our big, fabulous door into the room. We wanted to widen the doorway into the office to open up the space (we made about a 5-foot entryway where there used to be a standard door). Our plans were to make the office double as a guest room, so we wanted to be able to close off the 5-foot entryway. I found the best solution at the Habitat ReStore. It’s a 5-foot wide pocket door, complete with the hardware to hang it – only $125.
Here's that beautiful pocket door, shown lying on it's side.
Only problem was that it was about 6″ taller than the room. Eric had to shave a few inches off each end and reassemble it. But, boy, is she perty!
OK, the door was in the room – so we hired someone to drywall and mud. Eric thinks it was worth every penny to have someone
else do that. I can’t complain… it was done quickly and looks great.
Eric and Clayton model the new headroom created in the office. Note the new doorway in the foreground.
On to the ceiling. We decided to paint the ceiling a fairly dark color. It turned out to look quite nice – kind of made the duct work and the framing look like they were a planned part of the room.
For the walls, we choose a suede texture by Ralph Lauren. It was easy to do… roll on one coat, then paint tiny x’s all over the walls. If you look hard enough, you might be able to see smaller x’s on the bottom half of the room where I painted.
We choose a dark brick red for the ceiling. Here's a close up.
We used a suede texture on the walls. I highly recommend it... very easy.
For floors, we wanted something affordable and durable. We selected a vinyl flooring. We found what we wanted on the internet, and approached a local retailer (Sergenian’s) to see if they could match the price. Sure enough, they did – and they even took our old carpet away to recycle it. Nice.
Eric installed the flooring.
All that remained was the lighting, the trim work, to hang the door…
Lights were installed.
The office is almost done.
Now – really, I could use a hand decorating this place. I’m thinking about a fuzzy rug of some sort, maybe a big clock on the wall… I definitely need more lighting too… a desk lamp or two. A bookshelf.
Here is what the office looks like today.
And my office door... is awesome, it's more like art really.
Ultimately, it’ll just be the office – when we do our addition, we’ll move the guest suite upstairs. We have a dark brown leather couch and chair that we’ll re-locate down here. And I’d like to put up our sadly underutilized dart board too. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I believe our grand total was $3500.00 to renovate this space.
What do you think?
I happen to know its a superb space! So comfy for guests until you get a “real” guest room. You guys rock, really you do.
Why thank you so much! We do what we can
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I DO love that door! Very cool. It looks like you have big plans for the rest of the house as well. (Sigh. Don’t we all.)
Thanks! We’ll chip away at it, I think my expectations are in check – in the meantime, I’ll write to keep me satiated…
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Hi, cool room… question do you remember the name of the RL paint color?
Thanks Gabe! We went with Arrow Wood in a Suede finish… here’s the link:
http://www.ralphlaurenhome.com/products/paint/Finishes/Items.aspx?haid=76
It was easy – I’d do it again somewhere else around the house…
Let me