Our house has an unfinished garage basement where we enter and exit from everyday. It always seemed gross and dark and I wanted to change it because I had some extra white paint from the little update I did on our half bath.
It also had a shelf of random junk right at the bottom of the staircase. Yikes!
The first thing I did was take off the light, clean it, and changed the bulb to a daylight LED style. That alone made such a big difference! I removed the hand rail, those coat hooks, and took the shelf off the bottom landing-after going through it and deciding what we really needed to keep and what needed to be tossed.
Then I vacuumed, removed some cobwebs, cleaned the baseboard, covered some small holes, and removed a really old alarm system display that I patched with this handy kit.
Finally I was ready to get to work on my vision I had for this space!
Kids are constantly bringing artwork home from school. Some are hideous and definitely get tossed in the trash immediately. But then there are the really cute, special items that you want to keep but no one ever knows where to keep these things! Most seem to end up in a box somewhere to possibly be looked at years from now. So I had an idea for using them that would also make the basement entrance into our house feel more bright and happy!
We bring groceries, kids, and all our junk inside the house through these stairs and sometimes bump into walls. I didn’t want to risk things falling off the wall and breaking so I found these white plexiglass frames that came with 5×7 and 8×10 mats that are 11×14. So plenty of options for the different size art pieces my girls have made.
I wanted the wall to have some various sized frames so I also ordered these frames that were 8×12 in size and had a 5×7 mat. I saved room for their future art so I purposely did not fill the entire space and plan to add them one by one as they bring home cute items.
I painted the door Tranquility by Benjamin Moore and spray painted the banister oil rubbed bronze. Actually, I started to spray paint it but we had a contractor working on our facia the day I was doing it and he took pity on me and finished it. That’s when I realized I’d been spray painting wrong my entire life!!
I had planned to put an unloading station at the bottom of the stairs-not just our basket for shoes. But, then we decided to sell our house so I will save that project for a later day.
We all love how the gloomy stairwell transformed into our little happy and bright entrance into the house!
Even if you don’t have kids, this would be a great idea for all those photos you take with friends or family.
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Simply Bankston 