Basement Apartment Paint Plan

Since Ryan and I will still be in Missoula for another year as he works toward his Computer Science degree, we’re officially living in my parent’s basement this summer! We have multiple weddings to attend and many family and friends to see, so we’ll be in Missouri for around 3 months.

Most twenty-somethings would probably try to keep such a living arrangement hush hush, because let’s face it, anytime you hear that someone lives in their parents’ basement, you judge them a little. It’s practically synonymous with being a loser.

But we’re not losers and we don’t really care if people think we are! The arrangement honestly couldn’t be more perfect for us. Our basement is finished (so we won't have any major renovating to do!) and it’s pretty spacious. We’ll have a kitchen (it’s ovenless, but that’s okay--I can use the one upstairs!), 1 ½ baths, our own garage, a living/dining area, an office nook, our own front door, and an area that my sister and I plan to transform into our dream craft studio!

Since my sister and I have major plans for the craft studio area, I’ll divulge details on that project, including paint colors and our mood board, next week. Today I wanted to share our paint plans for the rest of the rooms. To give you an idea of what we're working with, let's go room by room and explore the current "before" and the intended "after."

First up, the living room area to the left of the stairs. Right now it’s painted a dark tan, with the fireplace painted and one wall navy as focal points.

We want to keep things neutral since our existing living room decor is more earthy with some pops of aqua and lime green. Also, the space has very little natural lighting, so we don’t want to paint it too dark. Thus, we settled on this light tan, Sisal by Martha Stewart for Glidden.

I think it'll go nicely with our existing furniture and fabrics:

We're not going to do a focal wall in the living room, but we will be painting the fireplace a dark gray-brown shade,  Mushroom, another Martha paint by Glidden.

We’ll extend the sisal through the hallway that leads from the living room to the garage and utility closet. We’ll also continue it to the right of the stairs, where Ryan’s office nook will be located.

As you can see in the photo below, the kitchen adjoins with the living area, so we want the walls to complement the living room’s scheme. We also have lots of aqua yellow, and orange in our kitchen decor, particularly the gallery wall, which I'll be placing over this sink once we move. So the deep red color of the current kitchen walls wasn’t going to cut it.

Instead, we’re opting for Hummingbird by Martha Stewart's line for Glidden.

It'll look great with our current scheme and decor:

Moving on, let’s see the current bedroom! It’s pretty spacious and painted a sort of golden-green color that’s hard to capture on camera.

It’s a bit too dark for the windowless room, so we plan to lighten it up a bit with this shade of light brown, Natural Twine, again by Martha for Glidden.

I think it'll complement our existing color scheme:

The adjoining master bathroom is currently a cheery yellow color that would look great with our kitchen decor, but doesn’t really jive with our bathroom/bedroom scheme—maroon, teal blue, tan, sage green, and cream.

We plan on using the brownish-gray from the fireplace wall in the bathroom--it goes quite well with the greenish countertop in the bathroom, and though windowless, the room is well-lit enough that this color won't make it feel like a cave.

Plus it looks great with our bathroom stuff!

So there you go. Our basement paint plans, save the craft studio. We have some major organizing, purging, and painting to do to turn this place into our future home by next summer!

I can't wait to spill our craft studio plans SOON! We're working hard to clean out the room and get some projects done to share :)