Basement Entertainment Room Redesign Before + After

All right, it’s time to share another before and after. This one I’m really excited because a lot of times I record these, I get a little bit excited to show you and I record them before they’re installed or people were doing DIY design, which means that we just do the plan and the rendering and we don’t buy the furnishing and do the installs for people.

And so this one’s really fun because we have the finished photos. There’s just a couple of shelves to go up that the client had ordered and didn’t have them up yet. But I think you guys will be really excited to see.

This was for a brand new local board game review podcast and this is their recording space. They wanted a space that would look great on video when they are doing their reviews, wanted to make sure the layout worked for gameplay, and wanted it to be comfy for those long D&D sessions. 

Let’s talk a little bit about the challenges with this basement. Obviously we needed to get a TV in here somewhere. Right now they have these big Ikea Lack Coffee Tables and that was really important to keep because they were purchased specifically for game nights. It’s a number of guys and they all come over and a whole bunch of friends, and I know we were there for a party after the furniture was installed and there was 30 people there playing a game It was really important to have that large, large surface in the space.

Other big challenge of course is that we have this big, long fireplace. We have a ledge underneath the fireplace and we don’t have the budget to start ripping out the hearth or anything like that. And we kind of loved the brick. It gave the space a lot of character but brick does suck up a lot of light in a basement. This basement already had light, bright white walls, but you can see it still feels a little bit dark. And of course because this is a gas fireplace, it does emit a lot of heat, so we wouldn’t want to put a TV above it. Heat does ruin the insides of the TV and my dad actually fixes the TVs for a living. TVs are an investment so you don’t want to ruin them.

Over on this wall here is where this big armoire could go. So that’s good because that was just a really, really big piece for this space.

And obviously we needed a new sofa. This one was kind of on its last legs, a bit droopy, couldn’t really be replaced and it was too short really for the room. What these guys really wanted were pieces that could move around and go around the table. So yes, they still wanted to have a three seater sofa option available for lounging, this is still a family home. They use this for when they have friends over or to watch movies and things like that. It’s still the main TV room inside of the space.

Also, we had this wall to work with. Now this doorway right here leads down to a storage room, so this is an open doorway right here. The dog crate can’t go anywhere and that’s fine because it was kind of outside. You can see that there’s a bit of a partition in the room right here, you can see these brick columns here over the top, and then it’s open in between, but we have brick columns on either side here and these columns separate the living space from the office space that you made it.

Let’s take a look at what we did. We actually rearranged the room to get more seating in because right now there was just this little arm chair here and a little two seater sofa. Really the only enough room to sit three people comfortably, and then they had some floor cushions here that they could pull up to sit more people. There just wasn’t a lot of room to sit enough people comfortably, especially for the big parties that these guys have. And often have a dozen or more people in this space.

Let’s take a look at how we rearranged things. The first thing that we did before I kind of show you the next photos, because we don’t have a photo of that wall. The first thing that we did here is we moved the TV onto this back wall right here. The TV is now living when you guys can imagine, just so that nobody’s like, where’d the TV go? (If there’s any dudes watching, that’s always Kyle’s first question, it’s like, “Where’s does the TV go?”) This is actually where the TV went and we use the existing piece of furniture. They had this great little coffee table over here. It was really cute and it was painted and it worked well in the space. The TV then just moved onto that table. It was still viewable and we just had this little table here in the corner. That kind of filled up this corner that armoire could go and then they just placed some photos and things like that around this. They put out their their graduation stuff and all that fun stuff.

Let’s see how we rearranged this space and here it is. Really excited. We did reuse the coffee table. One thing that you guys will see, if I go back here, this rug was just poster stamp. This is way too small for this size of a room. And because you’re placing even larger furniture in it, the rug had to get bigger. I mean, gosh, the sofa was going to be bigger than the rug.

This is a big mistake that I see people make because they think that you should be able to see the floor between the sofa and the rug. And to be honest, that makes a room feel a lot smaller when we create those boundaries of contrast for our eye to follow. General rule of thumb, if we were looking at the old layout, our rug should have been at least this big. So it should have gone underneath the feet of the sofa and just in front of the armoire dresser there. It should have been about this big.

We actually went from a 5×8 rug to a 10×14 rug, we almost doubled the size of the rug. And you just see what an impact that made in the space because now we were able to arrange larger scale furniture. The room just feels so much bigger honestly. And instead of having the sofa up against this side here, we actually opened it right up. We could still watch TV really easily because it’s directly across from these chairs, it’s directly across from this sofa over here in the corner.

But it really gave us this wide open floor plan and you can see that the use of colour in this space and just sort of brightening up and adding some of that colour and texture into the space makes the room feel a lot brighter, makes it feel like there’s a lot more light. We didn’t change the wall colour here.

The brick remained the same. The black coffee tables remained the same. Everything remained the same except for that we added in some brightness and lightness into the room.

Now, one thing that we also had in the design, they just didn’t have the chance to yet is a couple of shelves right here just on this wall. A couple of nice long shelves here and that gives them the chance to display some of the board games, maybe put up a picture with their logo on it, some family pictures, kind of whatever they wanted to do with that.

I think this just turned out beautifully. Normally I would style this if it were for a family home, but because they’re using this every single week to play games, it would just mean they’d have to clear it off all the time. Really we just left that empty. And these coffee tables are great because they can store some other games and things like that below it.

But this room just turned out so beautifully. We spoke to the mid-century era of this home through these chairs over here and then this so fab. Oh my gosh, I just love this so sofa. We’ve actually sold a lot of them because they’re nice. They’re firm enough to support you but comfortable enough to sit on and lounge in and be like, “Oh, I feel so much more comfortable.” And it is a modular sectional so you can actually break each of these three pieces apart really easily and then they could move these around the room. This one could easily shift over here as they’re playing to this end of the table. This one could shift over here to this end of the table. These two chairs during the party we just pulled them up near the table here so that everybody can be involved. Everybody was in a big circle. We could talk really easily and it was really fun.

Hope you guys liked it. I know they definitely liked it. Everybody at the party really loved that. And we will talk to you guys on the next video. Bye for now.