Unfinished Basement Playroom Ideas

Last year was a busy year! I started this website, and thankfully, at least a few people have read it! Thanks everyone for your visits! It’s been a fun year. For all you new readers out there, I thought I’d post some of the most-read posts from 2012 — enjoy! And, if you are wondering, I have created an unfinished basement playroom space for my kids, but it’s nowhere near as nice as I’d like it to be. I haven’t painted the walls or stained the floors in the unfinished basement playroom space, and there is still a lot of organizing to be done! I will have to keep working on creating a fun unfinished basement playroom space for my kids!

A Basement Living Space

Walk into my home on any given day, and you will be confronted with toys in almost every corner of our home. My kids have so many that I am actually at a loss as to where to put them all.So, I am hoping to convert our unfinished basement into a playroom—and I hope to make an unfinished basement playroom without incurring the costs associated with actually finishing or remodeling the basement. Like many homeowners, I could add a lot of useful square footage to my home if I converted the basement from storage space to usable space by inexpensively remodeling the basement. To make the space even cozier, I’m thinking of adding a Cozy Panda custom name blanket to the seating area so the kids can snuggle up while they play.

 

Unfinished Basement Playroom

So, it’s with interest that I read Thrifty Decor Chick’s post, “Our Unfinished Finished Basement.” Her post has a lot of wonderful affordable basement remodeling ideas. She even has an unfinished basement playroom space. Her now neat and orderly basement, while unfinished, has a craft area, a workout area and a play space for the kids. What’s amazing is that it looks very much like the ideal unfinished, yet useful space that I have been hoping to create for my elementary-school-aged kids.

I also like what Megan of C’mon Get Crafty did with her family’s unfinished basement space.

I have a lot of work to do, as my basement looks exactly like their “before” basement photos —they both did a wonderful job in updating their spaces. While I can’t completely clean out my basement (there’s a lot of family hand-me-downs that I can’t throw out, unfortunately), but what I can do is at least regulate only a portion of our basement to storage, and make the rest of it usable space. So, I have been doing a lot of research on budget basement remodeling and unfinished basement designs.

Ways to Improve an Unfinished Basement

These are among the options I’m considering for making our unfinished basement more of a livable space:

1. Paint the basement walls in the stairwell. I may also stain the stairs and add treads, which is something I, who is only a novice when it comes to DIY projects, can do on my own.

2. Move the storage to a back corner of the basement. In that corner I can add shelving for organization and separate the storage area from the usable area with curtains. Update: I was able to add a lot of storage in the basement to free up floor space—my husband added easy-to-assemble plastic storage shelves along one wall of the basement, as shown before.

3. Either stain the floors with a garage-floor epoxy, or install carpet tiles. I was thinking of creating a checkerboard pattern with two carpet-tile colors (perhaps green and gray) to make the basement space more fun.

4. Add storage for my daughters’ toys (either with bins or small bookshelves).

5. Create an exercise or game space — I might also like to bring my family’s lonely (and not used enough) exercise bicycle downstairs to the basement and give it a family of more exercise equipment that my husband, kids and I can (hopefully) use together. We’d also love to have a ping pong table some day. Update: We did get that ping pong table, but as you can see, we still have trouble with too much junk!

I will let you know how it goes!

Have any remodeling ideas for an unfinished basement, or have any basement project results and basement photos you’d like to share? Please add them to the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

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