Storage Room COMPLETE!

It's about TIME we finish this darn storage room project. EYEYEYYE! This one was a real dewsey - not because it was necessarily hard, but because it took a lot more effort than we were anticipating. This area in our home is located in the addition that was put on the house in 1960. The owners were incredibly intuitive to OUR needs and opted to add a full basement under the two story addition vs a crawl space. THANK YOU! When we purchased the home, it was a completely raw space: cinder block walls and a poured concrete floor. The previous owners used this space as storage and we chose to do the same.

There was definitely the option of using this space as a 5th bedroom or office. All it would have taken was a bit of framing, insulation, drywall and some electrical work. But all of that together would have boasted a pretty hefty price tag (not to mention code would have demanded an egress window be installed)...and frankly, we needed the storage space. So we opted to keep the space raw but freshen it up a bit and give it a bit more finished feeling.

Over the winter, we epoxy'd the floor with a kit by Rustoleum from Home Depot. It's about $60 and covered the roughly 225 square foot area. Here were a few pics of that little endeavor.



Next came painting the cinder block walls. We could have done something creative in the space, but personally, I wasn't trying to turn this into anything ground-breaking. I wanted it to feel clean and bright and give a nice backdrop to the colorful storage bins. So we used bright white masonry paint from Home Depot.

This 'masonry paint' is said to be a primer and paint in one, so it wasn't necessary for us to purchase two different products for the one space. It was, however, necessary for us to buy 6 cans of it in order to get two decent coats on the raw cinder block. If you've never painted raw cinder block, it's a CHORE. The block walls might as well be sponges as the paint seems to disappear as you roll it on. Now is the time for me to offer up HUGE, huge kudos to my handsome hubby for single handedly taking on the painting of the entire room. What a guy! Where was I you ask? Where else...CLEANING!!!!!

Once the walls were finally painted and the room was starting to take shape, we explored shelving solution ideas. We thought about building them using lumber and plywood, but ultimately decided we wanted something a bit more polished. Next we considered the idea of using the same shelves we used in our last storage room, which were wall mounted pantry shelves.

However, mounting them would be difficult on the concrete walls (there were studs installed behind the pictured shelves in the basement in order to install the drywall). The other thing we were trying to figure out is how we could invest in something we could take with us if we moved (the pantry shelves would have been around $750 to provide us enough space and that doesn't include the framing that would have needed to take place). We ultimately decided on these shelves from Home Depot that are free standing and easily disassemble should we decide to jump ship.

In all honesty, the first one took us about an hour to assemble and we were at eachother's throats by the end of it. Luckily, we got better at it and by shelf number 6, we were down to assembling them in about 5 minutes and high fiving the whole time! The shelves are completely adjustable which is awesome and we also had an abundance of leftover shelves. We may opt to use them in the garage, or just keep them nearby in case we ever need them. The dimensions are 72" tall by 48" wide by 18" deep. They work perfect for our space!

So, here you have it, the official afters of our storage room.




Of course in the coming weeks I hope to get my labels updated and other little label worthy signs posted. By the way, everything is organized in a progression we figured of birth to death starting with 0-3 month baby girl clothes and ending at gun ammunition. That gave us a good laugh. And as you can see, we have plenty of space to grow into. Now all I need to hunt down is a clothing rack to hang our spare winter attire seen here.

SO relieved to have this project behind us. Next we'll be moving out to the yard and garage and will wrap up house renovation #2 with a laundry room refresher:-) In between those, ALL kinds of fun;-)