Right before the Christmas holiday we had a radon mitigation system installed in our basement. Turns out Columbia has a lot of this cancer-causing gas just hanging around. Lame-o. Basically how it works is the radon guys come and drill into your foundation (we have two) and create a well for the gas to collect. Since gas takes the path of least resistance, the gas will pretty much all pool here instead of seeping into our house in other ways. Then they install a pipe that connects the hole in the foundation(s) to a hole they cut to the outside of your house. They seal it up nice and tight so no gas can eek out, then put in a fan that runs 24/7 to keep the gas flowing outside of the house. And with that, we are radon free! Woot!
The whole thing took about two hours. Not too bad!
Gee, I sound so knowledgeable about radon.
I was really happy to have this completed because our radon levels were a little bit higher than normal and I’d like to avoid cancer if at all possible. Crazy, I know. I was also happy to have it done because it inspired me to paint our laundry room/basement area! I bet you thought there was nothing left to paint… that’s what the hubby thought, too.
There was nothing wrong with the color of our laundry room as it was.
A boring neutral was just fine for the space. But I spend a fair amount of time down there, especially at those cabinets in the back. The cabinets in my craft room are a great sitting height, but the cabinets in the laundry room are great for projects you want to do standing. I wanted to brighten up the space a bit.
I set out to paint the whole space white. Yes, white. I never want to paint anything even close to white, but I didn’t want another blue room and I didn’t want to paint the space anything crazy. So white it is.
I went with Behr’s Waterfall Mist. It was a nice contrast between the white of our door frames, so that was a win.
Well, it turns out Waterfall Mist is blue. Even though I tried to paint my laundry room white, I ended up painting it blue! I think there is something wrong with me.
Look…. even in the Behr virtual paint chip wall, Waterfall Mist is categorized as white.
But it’s not. *Sigh*
So I painted the whole room and stood back to admire my work… then realized I had inadvertently painted another room in the house blue. Oops.
At least it’s brighter!! And I love blue…
The other mistake I made, aside from painting it a completely wrong color, was I painted our stairs (which were orange before) the same color as the walls. That just looked weird. Really weird.
So the day after Christmas I ran to the store to pick out some dark brown paint to match the floor you can see peeking in from under the door.
Ahhhh…. much better.
All in all, the basement looks nice. It’s not some crazy huge improvement to what it was before, and let’s keep it real, I’ll probably want to paint it again in the future. At least for now it satisfied my itch to paint something. Now I just need to make some cutesy decorations for the laundry room and I can let it be for a while.
Maybe.
A Smith of All Trades 