Basement Metamorphosis in Progress!

The basement metamorphisis has begun!
We have lived with builder white in the house longer than I care to admit. I love space planning, but color can keep me up at nights! I tend to blame my "color hesitance" on my husband, he is far less adventurous than I am. When we were first married, he me talked out of a certain gorgeous Salmon I had in mind for our first house; based on his objections, the color went down a couple of tints, to what ended up an insipid pale peach color. I never really liked it. At least, that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Now, many of my painting adventures are accomplished when he is on a business trip.

The basement, which functions as home office, home theater and craft space, needed color. Frankly, it needs more than just paint, it also needs bamboo flooring, improved lighting, cable management and better furniture. But the first start was to paint. Why start with paint? Several reasons. For one, paint unifies the room, making a room feel more complete. Another reason to start with paint, rather than say, floors, is that you can drip on the worn carpet that is leaving the building without worry.

Of course, before an ounce of paint can go on the wall, a plan had to be developed. The plan includes changes to the floor, paint and furnishings. I searched for photos in the plan on rate my space on HGTV's site and other sites, to find a style similar to what was in my head. Then I combined paint chips and rug samples to complete the plan.

As mentioned earlier, the basement functions in part as a home theater, therefore a dark paint is needed to improve the picture. Of the five paint finishes, gloss, semi-gloss, satin, eggshell and flat, the last two are good choices for a home theater. If the room is painted in a higher gloss, the purpose of painting the room dark is defeated by the light reflection that the glossy paint provides. Home theater purists would argue that only matte is appropriate for a home theater, but I prefer the softness of the eggshell over matte.
We considered several shades of grey, all the way down to charcoal. Ultimately, we wanted the basement to be a little warmer, so we chose Library Mahogany by Ralph Lauren in an eggshell finish.





The other difficulty was what to do about the screen, or lack thereof. We have been using a blank white wall. We considered purchasing a home theater screen, about a $2000 option, painting the current wall with expensive specialty paint, about a $200 option, leaving it white, an ineffective option. Finally, I googled "home theater screen diy", one more time just to see if threre were any new ideas. Behr's SilverScreen, E770-E2. One quart, a fifteen dollar option, okay $20 with a brush. Here is the screen, with Mr. Smith goes to Washington and a Washington Nats game for comparison.





This "Nine News" is an image from before the SilverScreen paint, not bad, just not nearly as crisp as the after.




Woops! I forgot to add the image!