I spent several hours yesterday getting the home gym cleaned up so that I could start working on this room again and finally get it finished. Over the last several months, this room had been used as a storage room, workshop, etc., while I was working on the master bathroom remodel, and when I was finished with the bathroom, the unfinished home gym looked like this…
Actually, it looked a little worse than that. I didn’t remember to take that picture until after I had taken some things out of the room. But you get the idea. It was bad.
I was determined to get the bulk of it cleaned out before I went to bed last night because I didn’t want to spend more time today cleaning up. I wanted to be able to walk in there today and actually start working on a project.
So after several hours of work (with plenty of breaks because the job was so enormous and overwhelming to me), this is what it looked like last night when I finally quit around 9:30.
I’m pretty proud of my progress! ? And I’m very proud of the fact that I didn’t take all of the tools and supplies out of this room and just dump them in another room. I actually took the time to put everything away in its place. I can actually find my tools now!
The biggest projects that I still need to do in this room are (1) finishing all of the trim, and (2) finish installing the hardwood floor in the closet area.
As far as the trim goes, the hardest part of that project is done. All of the trim is installed on all of the doors, windows, and the one cased opening around the closet area. And as far as I can tell, all of the nail holes have been filled with wood filler, and on at least one window, the wood filler has been sanded. So the rest needs to be sanded, and then all of it needs to be caulked, primed and painted.
And then the closet area still needs hardwood flooring installed. The reason it doesn’t have hardwood flooring is because this area used to be two separate closets. One of the closets (basically the right half of the closet area you see below) was for this room with a door on the right side of this wall. The other half (the left half of the closet area you see below) was the closet for the room on the other side of that pink wall, which is the guest bedroom (i.e., the bedroom we’re currently using as our main bedroom).
You can see in this picture below how this closet area used to look with the solid wall and a door into the closet on the right.
So when I decided to add new built-in closets flanking the window in the guest bedroom…
I had our contractor drywall over the door to the closet in the guest bedroom, and open up both closets to this room with a cased opening.
After that was done, that left me with two strange rectangles of hardwood flooring that didn’t cover all of the new space in the closet. So I just went ahead and took all of that out, and now it needs to be replaced.
The frustrating thing is that the Home Depot in my city used to carry this identical unfinished red oak hardwood floor in stock, and it would match up with the original 70+ year-old red oak hardwood floor in our house perfectly.
But ever since 2020 and supply chain issues hit, I haven’t seen it in the store, and the couple of times I checked the website, it wasn’t available there, either. So I may be forced to go as far as I can with what I have on hand, and then fill in the rest with plywood. It’s not an ideal solution, but since the whole floor is going to be covered with this foam gym flooring, it’ll work.
It’ll only be a problem if we ever decide to take up that foam mat flooring and refinish the hardwood floor in that room. But I’ll let Future Kristi deal with that problem. ?
For now, my immediate goals in this room are to (1) install the ceiling fan and the lights in the closet area, and (2) finish all of the trim. Those two things will go a long way towards getting this room out of the “construction” phase and making it feel more like a usable room.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
I hope you’ll join me on my DIY and decorating journey! If you want to follow my projects and progress, you can subscribe below and have each new post delivered to your email inbox. That way you’ll never miss a thing!
