Home Gym Status & Closet Wall Decision

I heading towards the finish line on our home gym, although if you were to see the room today (which I’m about to show you), you would never think this room is near completion. Let’s just say that over the last three days or so, the room looks like a tornado went through it.

I still haven’t installed the Swedish ladder, so it’s taking up a whole lot of floor space. Then I had to buy some trim and bring it in. There’s remnants from the closet flooring project, and the dresser makeover project. It’s a mess, but I’ll get it cleaned up today. I have to because Matt needs to have access to the bathroom tomorrow morning, and through our home gym is the only access to the bathroom right now.

I had ordered four frames from Michael’s to go with the two that I purchased in the store so that I could hang six prints on the long wall to the right just inside the door. The four frames arrived, and all four were broken or damaged. The glass was broken on two of them, the frames were broken on three, and the fourth frame didn’t have corner protectors on it, so while it didn’t break in transit, the corners were all banged up. I think if I mix and match the pieces, I can salvage one whole frame with glass and mat, and that’s only if I’m willing to wood glue one of the broken frames back together. So that was incredibly disappointing.

The plywood cutout that I ordered for the opposite wall is supposed to be here today. Hopefully, it will arrive in one piece.

I spent a lot of time reading through all of your comments on yesterday’s post, and coming up with a plan for the closet area. And I have one! I think it’s a very solid plan, but it wasn’t any of the three that I proposed. It’s actually a different plan that many of you suggested, and that I hadn’t even considered. That’s why I love crowdsourcing for ideas! 😀

The plan is to paint the whole closet — side walls, main wall, and maybe even the ceiling — a solid color, but not a color selected from the strips in the main part of the room. It’ll be a different solid color that may of you suggested.

So I headed to Home Depot to pick out a paint color based on the suggestion that many of you gave me, and I ended up with Limousine Leather. Yep, that’s right. It’s black. Actually, it’s blacker than black. Literally.

I had narrowed it down to Black and Limousine Leather, and I asked the guy at the paint desk if he could tell me the difference between the formulas for the two colors because they looked so similar. He said the difference is that Limousine Leather has more black in it than Black. 😀 I thought that seemed a little ironic, but there it is. Limousine Leather is blacker than Black.

But before I could paint, I had to get in there and do some sanding. Since I had taped off and painted stripes on the side walls, I couldn’t just paint right over those because the taped off areas (i.e., the tiny white stripes) would show under a solid coat of paint. So before painting, I had to sand those smooth. I made quite the mess, as you can see from the carpet, but I have full confidence that all of that will vacuum up easily.

And also before painting, I had to install the ceiling lights. I still had to cut the holes in the drywall for the lights, so creating drywall dust absolutely had to be done before painting the walls black. Could you even imagine the mess if I had painted first, and then created drywall dust right next to a newly painted black wall? Anyway, I’m glad to finally have these lights installed!

Here’s what the lights look like when they’re on, at least for now. I’m sure painting the walls black will have an effect on how bright those lights look.

So that’s as far as I got yesterday. You’ll have to check in on Monday to see how this looks once it’s all painted. I think it’ll look great! It’s the only solid color that made any sense to me, and I’m so glad that so many of you suggested it. That teal didn’t work for me at all, and it’s the only one of the stripe colors that I could imagine using in such a large quantity. But the black just seemed to work in my mind. I sure hope it turns out as great in real life as it looks in my mind! 😀