Hello, and happy 2021! I know we’re all hoping that 2021 is better than 2020, but before we flip 2020 the bird as we walk away, we had to try to fit one last project in: An office makeover for my husband Steven. (This is not his office… yet.)

Image from here.

Here’s the actual space, before we started working on it. Well, almost. Imagine that cabinet on the right still on the wall. I suspect that those cabinets were originally in the kitchen, but they were nailed up here in the basement when we moved in. We used them for storing cleaning products and random basement stuff. (It’s way too easy to accumulate stuff when you have a basement to put it in.)

Steven has a real office space outside of our house, but even before the pandemic, he often worked from home. Now it’s 99% of the time. I had a long-term idea about someday sprucing up his basement office space, but for obvious reasons we decided that “someday” should be now.

After we had already started this room, I happened to get curious about the 2021 Pinterest predictions. One of their 2021 trends is the “cloffice,” aka the closet office. A lot of people are on the same page right now. Our neighbors down the street are adding a tiny house to their back driveway.

This space has worked as a part-time office, but definitely has a lot of obstacles to overcome before it’s approaching pretty. Here’s our plan:

• Remove the cabinets
• De-popcorn the ceiling
• Smooth and paint the concrete walls
• Add walls and a pocket door
• Level the floors
• Hide the electrical box

Aesthetically, we want a dark, library vibe, like this photo and the one at the top. My husband requested as much dark wood as possible.

Image from here.

We started a few days after Christmas, and have made pretty good progress considering we can only work on a lot of it when my mom comes over to watch Juniper.

We started with the cabinets. Taking them off of the wall only required a crowbar and some muscle to pry the nails out. And then we used cement to patch holes left when the nails pulled chunks of concrete out with them in a few places.

Next, we scraped the popcorn off of the ceiling. It came off pretty easily with a spray bottle of water and a putty knife. “Easily” is relative, though. I was worn out and I had a blister on my hand after a few hours of scraping and sanding.

The walls were next up for their beauty treatment. The painted concrete foundation was super rough and textured. Building walls over it would have meant losing precious inches of space in this cloffice. Since Steven keeps a space heater under his desk and we’re going to add a rug, we weren’t worried about additional insulation. So instead we decided to resurface it.

After doing some googling to figure out what products to use to cover painted concrete, I discovered that they weren’t available at local hardware stores. But they did have some of what I needed at a store geared toward contractors, White Cap. So I headed over, explained my project, and they told me exactly what to buy. It was great.

For 110 square feet of wall, I bought three bags of SpecPatch repair mortar and a gallon of SpecChem Strong Bond (the packaging is different, but I think it’s the same as this.) If I had been doing the calculations myself, I would have bought more mortar, but it was exactly the right amount.

You can either mix the acrylic bonder with the mortar, or paint it on and apply the mortar on top. We mixed the mortar with water and applied it on top of the wet bonder layer with a trowel.

Here it is, mid-application.

Before primer, but after drying:

After primer:

If you’re not convinced that resurfacing the walls made a difference, here’s a side-by-side of the edge where the wall will go. It’s more like a plaster wall texture now, instead of a gravel road somebody spilled paint on. And it only added like, a quarter of an inch to the walls.

Next we painted. Why did we paint even though we didn’t have the new walls up yet? We knew we’d probably have to do two coats with such a dark color. While hammering was off the table during our daughter’s naps, we could make progress by painting. And even though we tested the color, we wanted to make sure we liked it on every surface, ceiling included.

Yep, we painted the ceiling. Some people might argue that it will make a small, dark space feel even smaller, but I think it’ll do the opposite. (Designer Abigail Ahern agrees with me.) So far we’re staying the course.

Next up: Walls! Have Steven or I ever built walls? Nope. But not only are we building walls, we’re adding a pocket door.

So far so good! The walls are up, and it’s time for drywall. Have we ever done that, either? Not aside from a bit of patching. But we can’t let that stop us!

We stuffed the walls with recycled denim insulation as sound baffling, because one of our main problems with his old office space is that it’s right near the laundry machine. He does lots of video calls, and the sound of the laundry was disruptive, so we couldn’t do laundry during his work hours. Toddler meltdowns will hopefully be muffled by this, too.

Not so bad for people who have never done this before, right? (Experienced drywallers probably see all kinds of mistakes, but shhhhh, let me have this.)

And just look at that sexy pocket door. My husband found for $50 at Reclaim NW, and reconfigured it with new hardware into a pocket door. Yes, there will be close-ups when I show you the finished space.

So that’s where we are with the basement office so far. We still need to tape and finish the drywall, prime, paint, level/resurface the floor, add moulding, and add a cabinet to hide the electrical box. Oh, and the fun part, decorate. Which sounds like kind of a lot, considering that we’re pretty limited in the time we can work on it. But I’m pretty confident we’ll have it finished sometime before the end of 2021.