Category Archives: House / Basement Rec Room

Goodbye Guest Room, Hello Janery Studio

In April I shared the Guest Room “Reveal” – in quotes because it wasn’t a finished in my mind – and told you I was taking the room apart. If you guessed that I was clearing the space out to turn it into a dedicated workspace fro Janery, you guessed right.

For the longest time I was pondering the idea of transforming the guest room into my Janery studio, since Janery is something I spend time on every week, and guests are only occasional. I think that’s why I was so unmotivated to finish decorating the guest room, because in my gut I felt it wasn’t the right use of the space.

Having my Janery studio share space with our basement TV room has been a total disorganized disaster. I think it’s mostly psychological, but I have really had trouble working in that combo lounge/business space over the last year.

Then, when my first big bolts of fabric showed up needing a large storage rack, I realized that it was time to get serious.

With that in mind, I emptied the room a few weeks ago, and set about transforming it into a sensible workspace. This fun ensued, but then you always have to have chaos before you create order: Basement Mess1

I moved my sewing table and storage into the space, using this floor plan. My sewing table is quite large for the space, and if it gets to be too much I have a back up plan for turning it into an expandable yet smaller table.

Janery Studio Floor Plan

Then I set about building massive 10-foot shelves for part of the space. It was quite an adventure that is still in progress, because it didn’t turn out right the first time:

Building Shelves1

Depending on how much I can finish before we leave for Italy, I’m looking forward to sharing the progress with you over the next few weeks.

It’s not finished yet, but already I know the change was right. Not only do I now have a truly pet-free studio, I can enter the room, close the door, and know that it’s work time.

Project Updates: New Desk, New Chairs, Basement Mess

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I remember how, in my first year of blogging, sometimes I’d want to write a blog post but I had nothing to share. Gone are those days. . . and here are the days where I have so much I want to write about, so many projects I want to share with you – yet not enough hours in the day to document them all. Oh, how I sometimes wish I had the luxury of being a full-time blogger, so I could just do projects and write all day long.

But since that’s not the case, here’s a taste of all the projects where I’ve left you hanging. I’m slowly putting together detailed posts for them.

My second set of Roadside Danish Modern Dining Chairs: Finished!! Eek, I am so excited to have completed this project. Ryan can no longer say “you never upholster the furniture you drag in off the side of the road.” I am slowly working on a tutorial, complete with a video, for how I fixed the chairs.

Mid-Century Danish Modern Dining Room | The Borrowed Abode The only problem now is Ryan’s penchant for doing 3,000 piece puzzles on our dining table. Kind of screws up my ability to serve dinners and/or do tablescapes.

My next crowning glory is the building of my rustic farmhouse desk:

DIY Pottery Barn Desk | The Borrowed Abode

Again, a tutorial is in progress. I’m trying to create actual building plans in Google Sketchup, but in the mean time may have to give you a general process rather than detailed sketches.

With my desk built and stained, my office is in the final stages of completion, and it’s just as exciting as the completion of the dining chairs. Next projects in here are cord control, a charging station, and hanging some art. But don’t go thinking it’s all rainbows and unicorns over here at the Borrowed Abode. Thanks to my removing the guest room, our basement currently looks like a bomb hit it. That bomb would be me.

Basement Mess

Actually, the other half of my office does too. I’m currently debating whether or not a yard sale would be worth the time and effort. The reason it may not be is because spending a Saturday morning working on Janery may be more financially rewarding than haggling over a 50-cent box of books.

What kind of projects are you working on? With spring in the air it means it’s warm enough to spraypaint outdoors again!!

Pet-Proofing Furniture: Comfort Works Leather Sofa Cover

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Ryan and I decided to try and pet-proof our TV sofa using a leather sofa cover from Comfort Works – a supposedly Australian company that offers custom slipcovers for Ikea furniture. This review was not sponsored, and I paid for the slipcover with my own money.

In my Tour of the Basement Rec Room, you may have noticed the shiny gleam of a black, leather-covered sofa.

Basement Tour03

It’s Ryan’s beloved bachelor sofa, the now-discontinued IKEA Kramfors, which was covered in a nubby gray woven fabric. This rough texture apparently screamed to the cats “Scratch Me!”

Before he and I moved into this borrowed abode, my cats had never, ever scratched furniture.

Kramfors Sofa Before: Nubby Gray Fabric Cover

That’s when we got a clue and filled the house with scratching toys. Bi-weekly nail trims, also known as cruel cat torture (just ask them), followed. When that wasn’t enough, we also covered Ryan’s sofa with tin foil.

Funnily enough, Ryan and I were not content to live with a foil-covered sofa forever.

Enter the Modena Black Leather Kramfors Cover from Comfort Works, which I ordered for Ryan as his Christmas gift. At $400 after shipping, it wasn’t a cheap investment, but we saw it as a good practice run with leather before having the white sofa professionally reupholstered in leather or pleather.

The sofa cover arrived within 3 weeks, and the two of us easily put it on the sofa. It required some tugging and squishing, but the end result was a pretty tight fit. However, it would be tough to put on alone. Comfort Works Leather Sofa Cover Review | The Borrowed Abode

My only complaint about the product was that it was a little hard to get a perfect fit on the arms, and there were very obvious wrinkles in the leather. The wrinkles are smoothing out after a few months, and the arm looseness seems to be disappearing, so I am guessing that it takes a little time and use to “break it in”, so to speak.

Bottom line? We are glad we ordered a leather cover for the sofa, but are going to wait a while before investing in professional leather upholstery for the white sofa.

As for cats scratching, see below. It appears that they tried scratching it once, probably not realizing that it was a different material, because there is one set of tiny holes in the arm. (White specks in photo.)

Comfort Works Leather Sofa Cover Review | The Borrowed Abode I was frustrated that the cover was already marred, but it’s actually less visible in person than in the photo. For now I’m keeping an old towel over each arm when we’re not using the sofa, and if they do try to scratch the towel, it will slide right off the sofa. So far the towels have not budged.

To train the cats not to scratch it ever again, I’m going to put scratching posts at either end of the sofa, then move them away over time.

In short, the Comfort Works Leather Slipcover pleased us, and seems to be a good solution for our four-pet household. The lack of transparency and some questionable practices by the company, however, did not. I’ll be back tomorrow to tell you about that.

A Tour of Our Current Basement Layout

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I realized, after I shared my Janery fabric storage issue yesterday, that you actually haven’t seen the basement in its entirety lately.

Several years into life at this abode, our basement remains the most undecorated, unsettled, and frustrating room of the house. This is mostly due to my often-changing thoughts on how the Janery space should be set up down there. As a result, I haven’t done much since I shared the basement color palette plan last March.

So here’s a little tour to give you an accurate picture of the space in its current state.

Coming down the stairs you face my sewing storage cabinets.

Basement Tour06 Turn to the right and you see the entire rec room. The sofa is now back in the middle of the room, and covered in black pleather (more on that in another post), and my large sewing table is now at the far end of the room. Basement Tour04

I have some art hanging on the wall as I’ve been playing with wall gallery layouts lately. Basement Tour10

A few rolling plastic drawer units store my sewing supplies (needles, scissors, etc) as well as my crafting supplies and scrapbooks in process. I wrestled with using these because I would’ve preferred a more attractive solution, but you can’t beat the ease of use with them. Basement Tour08

And if you turn around at the sewing table and look back towards the stairs, you see the behemoth. The ugly “accessory” is a treadmill that we bought a few months ago. I wanted to hate it, but it makes exercising so easy that I’ve actually grown quite fond of it. Basement Tour02

I like decorated, cohesive spaces. As part of my ongoing January goal of finishing abandoned tasks, we’ve been working on this space and I look forward to sharing the big changes next week or so.

If you have workout equipment in your home, I’d love to hear how you make it work with your decor . . . or if you just deal with its ugliness.