basement family room tour

From all the comments in my last post, it seems like we're all on the same wavelength when it comes to decorating trends: What's most important is that we decorate our homes in the style that we like best, and not what designers are saying is currently trendy. Warm, comfortable and welcoming seems to be the key.

I had said that my decorating style was a mixture of styles and showed photos of the upstairs, but I didn't show any of my downstairs family room. The decor down here is a little different from the upstairs in that it's mostly modern. My home is a ranch style with a 3/4 finished basement, which we made into a family room. We used to have carpet down here until the basement flooded. The contractor talked us out of putting down new carpet or even laminate, as "it's not a matter of if your basement floods, it's when." He's right. We've had two major floods, plus a handful of minor ones. So, we chose to have the cement floors painted and then use rugs for some warmth.

We honestly rarely use this space anymore. We don't watch much TV and when we do so, it tends to be in the bedroom. When the boys were growing up, this is where they played with their friends.

It does give me room for my hundreds of books and the dreadmill (as I fondly call it). 

These are books I haven't even read yet!

There's an L-shaped bar in the back corner. When the boys were growing up and we had birthday parties, it was a great space to hold the food buffet and cake. And when they were teens and had friends over, it held a lot of pizza boxes! All that graces the bar top now is a printer. The guy who lived here before us built this bar and there's cabinets in back. That's where I keep a lot of my large kitchen appliances and serving dishes (food processor, Crockpot, air popcorn maker, ice bucket, pitcher, cake stand). I definitely want to get rid of those old, ugly bar stools and replace them with some nicer ones "someday".

Then in another corner, we have Tim's drum set and guitars. This is where the treadmill used to be, but then Tim moved back home from college and we had to shuffle things around to re-accommodate his stuff. The bookcase in back is filled with children's books - all which belonged to Phil and Tim. They had tons more, but these were the ones I kept.

Thanks for visiting ~ and for those of you who live in the US, have a happy and blessed Thanksgiving with loved ones!