I'm back!

Sorry for the disappearing act.  I last posted right around spring break when we knocked out a wall to join two rooms into one larger gameroom.  Then life happened   While we were still getting some work done, I found it impossible to find time to blog between cracking the whip re: end of the year grades, summer vacation, trips, dog problems and generally having my kids around 24/7.  So, now that we are in the first week of school, I am getting caught up with things I have neglected over the past few months.

We are almost done with the gameroom except some furnishings, but I'll be posting as if I am now doing the work  We have also started demo on the giant bathroom that will become two bathrooms, but more on that later.

So here is where we left off.  My husband and I wrestled this giant beam into place to take the load of the wall we removed.

I had to put stain blocker on an old water spot on the ceiling and repaint.

Since this room, and most of the house for that matter, has paneling over unfinished sheetrock, we decided to take the easy way out and paint the paneling.  Not only does that let us avoid having to finish all the sheetrock, it allow for cuts in the sheetrock to move electrical which can be easily covered up by the paneling.  We were able to use the removed paneling to cover the beam.  This paneling would never be my choice as it has intentional pock marks all over it as if it were weathered wood.  However, the upside is that imperfections blend right in!







Then it was time to choose a paint color.  We tried a lot of different options and actually didn't pick any of these but picked a color very close to the khaki color in the bottom rightof this picture.

(Please ignore all the junk, this had become our storage room!)

Here is the room, cleared of junk and painted. (I'll post some better pictures later)  Notice the pony wall on the right.  These walls originally went up to about 5 feet with spindles connecting to the ceiling.  Blech!   You can see a little of this in the first picture above.  It made my kids want to put in saloon doors.  Uh, no. 

So we cut the walls down to counter height.  They were not load bear, just decorative.  This solution allowed us to keep the same flooring on the near side of the wall which is a tile.  The lower height will allow for cue sticks to be used above the wall when needed (more about the pool table later).  We are going to put shallow countertops on these short walls to allow pool players to set their drinks down.  Hopefully we are looking at doing a penny finish on the countertops like this:

I'll let you know how that goes.  Next up, flooring!