The Final Month, The Final Push

It’s December 1st. It hardly seems possible, but here we are. In this final month of the year, I want to do my very best to finish the year with a strong push towards getting the home gym finished.

Now if you’re wondering, “Wait. What about the bathroom?” don’t worry. I’ll be showing you the finished bathroom just as soon as I can. I still need to do some paint touchups, hem the shower curtains, and put the privacy film on the bathroom door. And then there’s this…

That would be Matt’s vanity mirror, which is now broken in to six pieces. Ugh!! Thank goodness it’s mounted on a thick cardboard backing, or it would be in even more pieces all over the floor.

I was trying to take the mirror out of the frame so that I could paint the frame, and even though I tried my best to be as careful as possible, it had been put into the frame using so much caulk that it just snapped like a twig. In hindsight, I wish I had just taped off the mirror to paint the frame, but after my mirror came out of its frame pretty easily, I figured his would, too.

So now I have to take this to the local glass shop and get this mirror recut, and with its custom shape, I’m sure that won’t be a one-day turnaround. So it’s looking like it’ll have to be next week before I can get the mirror, take all of the pictures, edit the pictures, and share the whole before and after (and in between) bathroom with y’all.

Anyway, there’s no use crying about it. Stuff like that is bound to happen every once-in-a-while, so it’s not a huge deal. In the meantime, I plan to finish up those last two or three remaining items, and then turn my attention to the home gym.

Our poor home gym. 😀 For months and months now, it has been used as a storage room for all of the bathroom materials and as a workshop where I use my miter saw to cut everything and build the vanities and storage cabinet. So now it’s time to get all of that cleared out and picked up, because as of this moment, it looks like the aftermath of a storm.

So here’s what I still need to get done in the home gym before I can call this room finished:

1. Clean out the room.
2. Finish the trim along the ceiling (the small trim that I opted for instead of crown molding).
3. Finish the door and window trim (still needs to be sanded, caulked, and painted).
4. Finish installing hardwood flooring in the closet area.
5. Vacuum the entire room, floor to ceiling, to get all of the sawdust off of everything.
6. Paint touchups on the wall.
7. Paint the door.
8. Install the foam gym flooring.
9. Build the Swedish ladder (which will go against the wall where the wide teal stripe is between the two windows).
10. Buy or build a storage cabinet for the closet (will be used for Matt’s gaming area).
11. Buy a TV and hang it on the wall in the closet.
12. Add shelves to the closet area.
13. Install the ceiling fan.
14. Install recessed lighting in the closet area.
15. Hang curtains (I decided to go ahead with the sheer curtains that I purchased for this room).
16. Hang the mirrors on the wall.
17. Move in the rest of the gym equipment.

I don’t have any expectation that I’m going to finish every single thing before the end of the year, especially considering that I usually take off the week between Christmas and New Year (that’s when I get all of my cheesy Christmas rom-com watching done 😀 ).

But I’d love to make a real concerted effort to get as much done as possible over the next three weeks, and cross off as many of those items from the list as possible so that I can start the new year off with a room that’s easy to finish.

And then I can get on with the room that many of us are anxious for me to finish — my studio.

So there’s still quite a bit to be done in in this rooml, but I’m definitely on the downhill slide towards the finish line. All of the really challenging things — those striped walls, installing the window trim, etc. — are done. Of all the project left to do, the most difficult one will be building the Swedish ladder, but I’ve gone over those building plans so many times in my head that I don’t anticipate that project being a problem.

I think once I get this room cleaned out, that will motivate me to get busy in here and get all of these remaining projects finished. How nice it will be to have a finished, usable master bathroom AND a finished, usable home gym!