Converting the Basketball Court into The Heart of Our Home: Open Kitchen, Living Room phase 1

Phase 1

When The Hubz and I bought this House in 2016, we knew the Kitchen in the basement would have to be moved upstairs. Lucky for us, the house provided THE PERFECT Space for it; The Basketball Court.

Yep, you read right, A Basketball Court. Seriously, for real. A Fucking basketball Court/ Rec Room. Okay, yes, totally cool! And, let’s take a moment to give props to the Dad who built this for his kids! He’s by far the coolest dad ever…

If you actually play basketball.

We don’t. Our kids don’t.

Making this a BIG WASTE OF SPACE for our family.

Converting the Basketball Court to a kitchen/dinning/living area is the BIGGEST RENOVATION in our house. Due to money restraints, this was going to be an ongoing project.

The very first thing we did was open up the space. The court was built on the main living level of the house, directly above the garage. This space was built for game; Guards on the light fixtures and thermostat, small windows, sweat sink, jersey hooks, and trophy shelves. The space itself is Grand, but with little natural light.

In the Summer of 2017, we decided to add (3) 6’x3′ windows on the west wall and cut an 11 foot “opening” along with a 5 foot doorway on the South wall. Doing this effects the structural integrity of the house, so we hired this out.

The outcome was exactly what we were hoping for. The light pours in and warms the space…. Of course removing the hoop helped a lot, too! We joked about leaving it. The thought of the kids tossing dinner rolls through the hoop may have been a deciding factor to veto that idea.

As soon as construction was cleaned up, we set up temporary seating and tried to use the room as much as possible to get a better feel for the space and how we wanted it to function.

In the winter, I brought in climbing structures for Princess and her friends to play on and of course this was, once again, our “Tree Room” at Christmas.

By January, I was getting antsy and started painting color samples on the walls. It took us 2 months to decide on a color. We went with “Repose Gray” by Sherwin Williams, in a Matte Finish.

In the Spring, The Hubz tells me the flooring for this room, that we had been storing for over a year, wasn’t going to work the way we wanted it to; there simply wasn’t enough.

I may have cried a little.

The “flooring” was 15 inch wide pine. I am IN LOVE with this flooring.

It was a big project, as the majority of the boards have raw edges and all of them need to be planed and sanded.  But I dried my tears when the Hubz said it was the perfect amount for our bedroom. As happy as that makes me, it’s still a bummer because our room will be the absolute last renovation we do.

Oh well, the flooring is stored and now we have to figure out a new floor for this space.

After looking at what felt like 100’s of floors, we finally decided on a laminate. I was really against this from the beginning, but the more research we did, the more we found this to be our best option.

And it was on sale. A good sale.

Let’s be real here for a second: We have 6 kids. Kids are little destroyers of all things nice.

Fun Facts: Mom paints wall, kid draws on wall. We buy a house with carpet, kid colors on carpet. I want to replace all of the hollow interior doors in the house because at least 3 currently have holes in them from.. guess what… The Kids!

So Laminate it is.

The Laminate we choose is Dream Home’s “Antique Farmhouse Hickory 10mm.” It comes with a 5o year warranty and a promise to hold up to my kiddos. It looks nice and I am happy with it. I’m sure I will be more happy when it’s out of the 43 boxes currently stacked all over the room.

More Fun Facts: Did you know that boxed flooring is a great “toy”? My littles have played for HOURS on these floors and they are still in the box! They have made stages and put on shows. The boxed flooring has helped Princess master “Steps” and has provided “mountains” for Little Man to fight Dinosaurs and Super Heroes on. Maybe we won’t put down the floor…. Ha! That’s funny. The floor is going in as soon as the painting and upper walls are finished.

By May, we were finally ready to paint!

I have THE BEST FRIENDS in the world. Without them, this room would still have color samples on every wall.

These Ladies came over to my house, played with Princess and their own kids; we are talking 1 year olds by the way. They painted and climbed to the heights I feared to climb. When the paint store mixed the wrong formula and we unknowingly painted an entire gallon of the wrong color on the wall, they were there to help again! I cannot express what their friendship and generosity mean to me. 

The Color has since been corrected and we are 1 gallon shy of being completely done with the painting of the walls.

The Hubz and I have said multiple times, “I am NEVER painting this room again!” For this reason we bought a high quality paint. The hope is that we will have to only “touch up” areas that are “kid height”.

To be honest, this room was a pain in the ass to paint because of the slanted ceilings. The staging cannot fit under it well, making it impossible for short people to reach the upper most corners. Thankfully, The Hubz is tall and got that added to his list. It took a while, but he finally had the time to climb up that staging and get the job done…  At night. Practically in the dark (we took down all the lighting except for one fixture, causing him to paint in the shadow of himself). He swore, I laughed.

The good news is that because this room has taken SO LONG TO PAINT and the floor is STILL in boxes, I went ahead and painted all of that ugly brown trim around the windows. I planned on leaving it, as we have hopes to put in larger windows in the near future, but staring at that brown trim was killing me. What a difference that made! Once I did that, that got me thinking about the stairs and the porch. Do you see where this is going?

Wait until you see it; it’s a game changer.

If you need a sneak peak, check out our behind the scenes on Instagram @myunplannedlifevt