Lipstick on a Pig!

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Years and are doing well. We had a really nice quiet Christmas in Baton Rouge and New Years in the mountains. We haven’t done a whole lot project-wise since my last blog. We have gotten a very slow start on our banquette for the mountain house, but we’re in no rush to finish it.

I did want to update you on what I wrote about in my last blog. My sister’s table, and our basement project. Let’s start with Susan’s table. She and Jeff came to pick up the table last weekend. You can read her blog here and find out more about how she finished it. I must say it looks amazing!

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Susan and I have joked for years that we want to start our own HGTV show called Handicapable. Kind of a joke, as she is blind in her left eye and I am deaf in my right ear! We both love doing projects!

Now on to the Lipstick on a Pig project. Let me tell you a little bit more about our basement before I get to the pictures. Our house was built in 1928 and our basement is part crawl-space, part basement. When I bought the place 9 years ago, the basement was truly horrific. It was filthy with a bunch of nasty wood on top of cinder blocks as “shelves”, etc. It had 1 bare light bulb to illuminate the entire basement. After I moved in, I gradually got it cleaner and removed a lot of the crap that was in there, but it was still gross. When Keith moved in, he called it a “Silence of the Lambs” basement. I’m not kidding when I say that I had to really think about whether I’d want to take my chances during a tornado warning down in the basement or upstairs in a closet!

As I mentioned in my last blog, a few years ago we started working on the basement. Keith rewired it and added a lot more lights and I painted all of the dusty nasty bricks in there. It took gallons upon gallons of paint to cover the bricks, but it helped brighten it a lot. Keith and I also covered the crumbling plaster at the top of the stairs with beadboard and even added a light up at the top of the stairs.

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Then last year I really got organized down there and was able to consolidate a lot of my storage in to space which was once where the stairs were to the outside (which are no longer there due to the addition which is now our den/kitchen). I’m even able to store my Christmas tree upright underneath the stairs! Prior to Covid, we had hired a trainer and had made it a little makeshift “gym”, but hadn’t gone too far with it.

As you’ll remember, we started on the project to make a giant pegboard for storage. For Christmas, Keith gave me a Pivot which allows me to turn our Peloton screen sideways for taking Bike Bootcamp classes and some of the other fantastic Peloton classes. I love it! Because of all of this, I knew I wanted to move the Peloton from our guest bedroom to the basement and start working out more. There was really just one spot that would work where Keith wouldn’t hit his head, and it was right next to a large opening to the crawl space. Without an easy way to really close that off, I made makeshift “curtains” to at least hide the crawl space. It’s a ton better than looking at the crawl space for sure!

Again, it’s not ideal but it works! While Susan and Jeff were here, we used Jeff for his muscles to help Keith get our Peloton down to our basement. Today we finally got around to hanging our giant pegboard and adding a few other touches to make it more conducive to working out. I had bought a pack of motivational gym hangings, which I used double-sided tape to attach to some ductwork which is right in front of the Peloton. I had a few left so added them to the wall where our weight bench is. I bought a cheap long mirror from Walmart and we hung that next to our pegboard. The last thing to do was for Keith to add an outlet so we could plug the Peloton in without running an extension cord across the basement. Without further delay, here’s the final result!

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Note that I am representing for the Saints today! 😉 Here are a few other close-ups for you.

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So now you’ve seen our Lipstick on a Pig project! I hope you like it!