Botbyl Style Aisle: Our newest and awesomely exciting renovation project!

Good Evening! After a long but interesting Saturday during which we hosted a yard sale, happily donated several items to thrift village, and spent well-deserved quality time with sweet pea, who is about to venture off into dream land, I'm finally settling down to commence a blog post about our latest project, (which I've been planning to create for a while), the basement! {Clara cooing at her fluffy giraffe from her crib while we speak} Here's a photo of Clara after our yard sale - completely pooped, and with dirty feet!! (Looks like her feet got an awesome tan!)

We've been extremely excited about our basement project and are slowly designing it from scratch. We made sure to get a dozen estimates, and thoroughly plan out every aspect of our project in order to make the basement as wonderful, aesthetically pleasing, and fully functional as possible, and in so doing, are now realizing how long it actually takes to come to a consensus about every single detail, opposed to just choosing flooring material or picking paint colors...or selecting one particular aspect of a room at a time.

This is the 1st time we're literally designing a space in its entirety, and choosing all the materials, and all in one time frame, and my untamable imagination is absolutely running wild!! I wish I could say the sky is the limit, however the reality is that the wallet is the limit...not the sky...but the awesome challenge is just that - to ultimately create a warm, beautiful, welcoming, high-end looking-ish inspiring space on a smaller budget using great but inexpensive materials, while being as creative, artistic, and imaginative as possible with the resources and items available to me. This will be quite a difficult challenge I admit, especially when we're extremely limited on time during the day to even think about, let alone plan, our renovation project. There's been a tremendous amount of pressure at school, with several new procedures and systems in place, and many demands stretching us thinner and thinner, (You guys know what I'm talking about) but I still am making it a point to make time for a project that we've been hoping to work on for a long time now.

The most exciting aspect of this whole project, and the 1st thing we're going to focus our attention towards tackling will be the creation of Clara's sweet whimsical cottage play space, to which I'm hoping to dedicate one full blog post, because my brain in swimming in a playful pool of fantabulous ideas, and I'm uber excited!! This project alone, I'm anticipating, will be finished around late November, early December...My goal is to have Clara's playroom all finished for her 1st birthday so she can literally move right in...not that she won't be living on the other floors of our house. She's getting to that point where she could really benefit from having her own play space! We could benefit tremendously from storing her toys down there as well.

The other two spaces that the basement will consist of are a living area and Jon's practice room. Our plans for these two rooms are as follows...For the living room, we're hoping to create a high-end urban industrial vintagy feel, a cross between restoration hardware and arhaus (if you've never been...you need to go!) but keeping it fairly simple and streamline with just a few important furniture pieces and a couple carefully chosen art pieces and or a gallery wall that I've been planning in my brain for some time now. The color scheme is teetering between just gray and dark brown, and gray, brown, rust red, navy, and kelly green for more of a vintage urban feel. For Jon's practice room, style and color scheme are still to be determined; The only certainty is that we're installing a beautiful wooden door with glass panels and a vintage sconce, which we have yet to find, in the practice room entry. Here are some photos of the 1st couple steps of our basement remodel.

Step 1 : We cleared everything out of the basement

Step 2 : The basement was framed

We are in the process of drywall, which is the 3rd and most exciting step so far if you ask me, and while we were hosting our yard sale, the crew was working extremely hard, non-stop, on nailing, taping, and carefully spackling the drywall. Jon and I are anticipating this portion of our basement project to be done by Wednesday, which is tremendously exciting, especially because the whole floor plan really comes together and you can literally witness the 3 separate zones coming to life, making it much easier to creatively envision the final project, and come up with a clear plan of attack!!

We've thoroughly thought through lighting options, and have decided upon recessed lights and are envisioning a vintage industrial sconce near the entryway to Jon's practice room, which will be the room on the other side of the door way shown in the photo above. We're also planning to put in a beautiful wooden door with glass panels, after much contemplation about and searching for rustic barn doors, then vintage doors, and arriving at the conclusion that a brand new wooden door with glass panels (opposed to a old vintage door) was the safest and best way to go. I'm definitely relieved that we won't be on a crazy search for vintage doors anymore, and can move on to other important details, although I will admit it was extremely exciting to find these beauties at this breathtaking antique store in Salem near Jon's work, an ad for which he stumbled upon on Craigslist:

Unfortunately, they just won't fit and there's always a possibility of danger using old materials in your house when you have a curious infant or todler...and a kitty who loves to lick old doors and shutters!! (that's certainly a post for another day) I just don't want to take that chance!

As of now, we still have a long way to go! I'm extremely pleased with how the project is turning out so far...and so is little pink socks!