Home Before & After: Basement

First off, the big news (for those who haven't heard it yet): we found another house!!  We are so happy.  It's huge and beautiful.  The home inspection was a week ago, and it was about as perfect as you could expect.  The owners have taken amazing care of the house -- they've put a lot of themselves into it.  I imagine it's going to be hard for them to leave it -- as hard as it's going to be for us to leave this house!  Anyway, we couldn't be happier with the new house.  Now it's time to start packing!

Before that, here are some more Amazing House Transformation pictures of the basement. I'm ordering these slightly differently from the last post: we'll look at one section at a time to compare.

This is the first view of the basement when you come down the stairs: the play area.

Before

 I don't have any zowie! shots of that area, so here is our real after:

ahhh...

 The official "rec room" part:

 Before:

yes, it really did always look like this.  even when the kids "cleaned"

 with staging:

actual conversation at the open house: "Wow.  How is that flat screen TV connected?" Realtor: "...It's not."

 REAL after:

THERE'S the real TV

 I wish I had a "before" shot of the game & puzzle shelves, to contrast with this staged photo:

Daniel was thoroughly depressed when he first came in and saw all the games missing

 the Real After:

that is as tidy as I can humanly make that area.  and that's after clearing out about half of what was there before.

Now, the dungeon!  Aka Home Office/Laundry/Utility Room:

 

this was actually quite tidy, since at the time we had cleared some space to receive the new washer & dryer

old washer & dryer

I could never find stuff on those shelves

Now, the reason there's no staged shot of this area is b/c it was piled up with boxes full of stuff they wanted to hide.  So here's the Real After:

such plush carpeting!  and order! and easy-to-findness! (just don't ask me to open the computer cabinet)

a place for everything, and everything in its place!

Of course, as I write this, the laundry room floor is covered with sorted laundry, the couch cushions are off the couch, there is a huge tent made of scarves and cloaks and about 97 million clothes pins, and there are legos all over the floor.

Here, lemme just show you:

the REAL Real After

But!  It cleans up so quickly!

And that *is* a pretty cool tent.