If you’re finding me through the One Room Challenge, welcome to my home on the internet! I’m Avery and I live in a charming 1910 Craftsman style parsonage in rural Iowa with my husband, Ben. You can learn more about me here, and see some of my previous design work in my kitchen, my High Style, Low Budget Sunroom from the Spring 2019 One Room Challenge, and my Cozy Eclectic Master Bedroom from the Fall 2018 One Room Challenge. My design style is warm, whimsical, and collected. I love sharing real-life home inspiration for people like me who want big style with a tiny budget. You can follow along with my homemaking adventures and thrifting trips & tips on the Holland Avenue Home Instagram.

For this round of the One Room Challenge, I will be finishing our unfinished basement to create a cozy family game room. You can catch up on my design plan through the link below!

Basement on a Budget: One Room Challenge Week One

Basement Demo and Waterproofing with Drylok: One Room Challenge Week 2

Catch-up and Ketchup: One Room Challenge Week Three

Week four is finished and we almost have a finished basement as well! Since last week’s post, we’ve been working hard to finish the drywall and get everything painted.

I chose our main paint color, Sherwin Williams Pewter Green, after seeing and loving it in Emily Henderson’s Portland House Kitchen. This kitchen is full of natural light (unlike my basement), but even after sampling the color in our low-light space, I knew it was the one.

(image credit: Emily Henderson)

After choosing Pewter Green as our main color, I decided to pull other colors from the Sherwin Williams Colorsnap Color ID Naturalist palette.

Colorsnap Color ID consists of eight exclusive palettes that have been thoughtfully curated to reflect your personality. The colors are perfectly coordinated, allowing you to mix and match with confidence. Simply choose the colors that move you and watch any room come together effortlessly.If you’re not sure which palette fits your personality, you can take the Colorsnap Color ID quiz to find your perfect match.

For our basement, I’ll be using three colors from The Naturalist palette.

We primed everything yesterday, and today we accomplished the step I’ve been looking forward to the most… PAINTING!

I was originally planning to have a dark accent wall (SW Pewter Green) and three lighter greige walls (SW Gossamer Veil) to keep things feeling bright. But when I thought about why I wanted “light and bright”, it was because I didn’t want it to feel like a cave, and I wanted the space to photograph well. Newsflash- those aren’t good enough reasons to choose a paint color. When I filtered the greige paint color through the “Do I Love It?” experiment, the decision became obvious. I did not, in fact, love the greige paint. (Sorry, greige. It’s not you, it’s me. You’re beautiful in other spaces, but you weren’t The One for my basement.)

I thought about how I wanted the space to feel instead of just focusing on how I wanted it to look.

It is a basement that we will use for watching movies and hosting friends and family. I wanted it to feel warm and cozy, like a hug. We live in Northwest Iowa where winter lasts for basically half the year. I know we will be spending a lot of time down here, so I wanted it to feel warm and inviting.

Those factors led to the decision to paint all four walls the same dreamy, dark, moody green. I don’t know what I was thinking before, messing around with the idea of greige. I would’ve had to rename my blog “Greige Avenue Home” and turn in my “Color Lover” card to whoever is in charge of auditing people who claim to love color. Don’t worry, though. I’m still a card carrying Color Lover and I have four green basement walls to prove it. I broke up with greige before placing the paint order, and brought home multiple gallons of Sherwin Williams Pewter Green.

Before I show you the dreamiest of all dreamy paint colors you’ve ever seen, allow me to remind you where we started four weeks ago.

Are you ready to see it? Behold, the Magical Enchanting Wonderland that is covered in Pewter Green (also known as my almost-finished basement).Want to see another before and after? Ok, I’ll show you another because I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT THIS IS THE SAME ROOM. Except I can, because I’ve seen it transform over the last four weeks through one drywall nail, brushstroke, and ice-pack-on-my-neck at a time. 

The other side is just as green, and just as good. It is just slightly more “entirely full of tools and stuff”, and other things. We used an extra door that was being stored in the basement to block off the storage room. I will sand it and paint it with Sherwin Williams Alabaster (the color of the stairway walls, stairway risers, and eventually trim). I have one coat of Alabaster on the risers, but I’m waiting until construction is finished to finish painting the stairs. Alabaster is also the color we used for the ceiling, and it is perfect. It is a warm white that is excellent for low-light spaces.

We’re using Sherwin Williams Emerald Interior Acrylic Latex Paint and it has changed my painting life forever. It goes on like butter, and dries so smooth. I used two coats because the green is so dark, and the coverage is incredible.

Ben is currently painting the exposed pipes to match the Alabaster ceiling. They are the pipes for our radiators. We possibly could’ve framed them in and covered with drywall, but it was less work to leave them exposed, and would make for easier repair if they ever needed to be accessed. I went back and forth on whether to paint them the ceiling or the wall color, but we decided the ceiling color would be best.

We have two weeks left to finish the rest of this space, and we are on schedule to meet that deadline! We decided to Drylok the floors since we have so much of it left over from the walls. It is an extra step, but it will seal the concrete floors to prevent any moisture or concrete dust from coming through onto the new flooring.

Here’s our schedule for Week Five:

• Day One (Thursday): Drylok concrete floors and begin installing flooring
• Day Two (Friday): Finish installing flooring and paint trim
• Day Three (Saturday): Install trim and paneling/shelves for minibar with Kirk (my brother-in-law)
• Day Four (Sunday): Rest
• Day Five (Monday): Paint minibar cabinet and mini fridge. Begin building furniture
• Day Six (Tuesday): Build furniture
• Day Seven (Wednesday): Build more furniture

Next week, I will probably be sneaky and only share a few close-up shots as I prepare for the final reveal. We have a lot of furniture building ahead of us, and I am counting down the days until I can lay down on our new sofa and take it all in. Until then, you can find me lovingly admiring our green basement and considering which room I want to makeover with our leftover paint. No room is safe from Pewter Green.

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Thank you to my partner, Sherwin Williams, for sponsoring this project!

You can follow Holland Avenue Home on Instagram for plenty of behind-the-scenes progress before it comes to the blog next Wednesday.

Head to the One Room Challenge blog to check out the other Guest Participants’ and Featured Designers’ posts for Week Four!

Thanks for reading!