The Basement Part 5: Paint and Flooring

Guys, we are bad at blogging. The basement studio has been finished for almost a year and we haven't posted the last progress post OR the before and after. Awful. This post is actually from a year ago! Here we go, basement part 5.We hired a painter-plasterer to come and plaster/prime the basement. Best money we have ever spent. We painted the studio and the laundry room a crisp "Decorators White" (of course) from Benjamin Moore. Our plasterer gave us some good tips on getting a good paint job and we plan on posting a tutorial later on this.So we painted:Chris did Movemeber. I had no idea he could grow a moustache. Thought I would toss in some evidence of facial hair. HA!Then we got down to the floor. We picked a dark grey vinyl click for the laundry room which is waterproof incase we have a leak. This product also works well on a floating subfloor. It went down super easy; Chris had the full room done in a few hours.Once the laundry room floor was done we got to work on the studio area. Here we went with a laminate in "Sterling Oak". It was affordable, worked in basements, and was the exact colour we were looking for. It is important when picking a flooring product for a basement to make sure it is made for the application. Some products don't allow installation in a basement setting. Also be sure your floor works with the type of subfloor you have laid.My friend Erika came to help.It took us a few weeks of picking away at it to finally get it all laid, but overall it probably would have been a weekend's work if we didn't take on multiple projects at once.We did a big Ikea order and picked up some cabinets/countertop for the laundry room and a couch for the studio.Chris has also been working on our built-in cabinets (with secret trap door to crawlspace storage) which run along one wall of the studio. We plan on painting the door fronts white for a seamless look. One of the cabinets will be dedicated to photography studio lighting equipment, the rest will be for out of season decor items, fabric, and the sewing machine.You can see in the picture above that we painted the stairwell flat black. We plan on doing a cool reclaimed wood on the opposite wall of the stairs, we will also be making our own stair treads.That's it so far until the big reveal of both rooms! We still have a few small things to finish up, like installing trim, painting the doors, making the treads and of course the decorating (my favourite part). Stay tuned!