Ta-Dum...The Great Basement Remodel of 2009

I cannot even BEGIN to tell you what a relief it was to get rid of the vile carpeting and boring white walls with thousands of nail holes in my daylight basement. It took about a month of hard work, many trips to Home Depot, and my entire renovation budget for the year. But here are the results...which I am absolutely thrilled with! The hallway is a soft, mossy green and the stairwell and bathroom are both robin's egg blue.

Rather than replace the transparent but otherwise perfectly good window in the bathroom, I made a trip to the local home salvage warehouse, bought a bunch of chipped glass blocks in all sorts of sizes and patterns and created a little vignette to give me privacy and a focal point for the wall. The bathroom is actually the same blue as the stairwell, but you'd never know it by MY camera settings...

I refer to this as my "Shabby Chic" wall. I created a faux linen look using golden glaze and a stiff wallpaper brush, making horizontal and then vertical stripes. I took the glass out of this rescued window and hung old pearl necklaces, pages from botanical books, skeleton keys and a wreath I made out of odd little fake roses. I used a very old pale peach lace scarf as a backdrop.

The 5 boxes came from a little chest of drawers I picked up at the Mother of all Goodwills (MOAG) near downtown Seattle. Some child had scribbled all over the front with crayons, so I turned them around, screwed them together and created this fun little storage/wall display thingie. The starfish on the front are actually big push-pins so I just pressed them right into the backs (which are now the fronts) of the drawers. All of the treasures inside are found objects. The framed prints are actually more pages from a botanical book placed inside matching white wooden frames I also found at the MOAG.