Progress on the Basement Rec Room

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s last week. Our kids had a nice long break from school, which was much-needed for all of us. Our family enjoyed lots of quality bonding time together.

To be honest, I’m always a little relieved when the craziness of the holidays is over and we can return to the normalcy of life. This week I’ve been working on taking down all the Christmas decor and plan on letting the house just “breathe” for a bit.

Meanwhile I thought I’d give you all an update on the progress we’re making down in our rec room.

As I mentioned in an earlier post a few months back, we’ve been in the process of giving our basement rec room a new purpose.

For the last several years it has primarily been a place for the kids to play with their toys, but we are trying to expand on that a bit and make it more of a fun hangout place for our entire family to enjoy.

We’ve purged through a lot of the excess and added some new features that will hopefully allow us to achieve exactly what we’re after in this space.

And we’re making huge strides in the right direction!

We got rid of some of the older furniture that was not functioning well for us down here and swapped it out for a new IKEA sleeper sofa and entertainment cube storage system that holds all of our movies.

The sleeper sofa is essential for when we have out-of-town guests – like my husband’s family – come to visit.

You really can’t beat IKEA’s reasonable pricing, especially since they were offering a 20% off sale on all sleeper sofas at the time we purchased. And even though this couch came delivered in about 50 different boxes that we had to assemble ourselves, I still am really loving what we chose.

This model is the SANDBACKEN 3-seat sleeper sectional in beige. While it doesn’t have a ton of “gush” to the couch, it’s still moderately comfortable, especially with a bunch of throw pillows and blankets.

I love the fact that the footrest section is removable and the top lifts off for extra storage of sheets, pillows and blankets for the guest bed, which conveniently lowers and rolls underneath the couch.

The little blue side tray table is also from IKEA and was only $20!

This corner nook is perfect for a tall bookcase storing our board games and a popcorn machine.

We are big into family game nights, and it’s our desire to be more diligent with scheduling them more regularly.

We also moved a small table and chair set that we’ve had for a while into the corner of the room for an area to sit if we want to work on a puzzle together.

Winters in Wisconsin tend to be long, which makes for excellent puzzle time!

We even got to spend New Year’s Eve down here as a family together, popping some popcorn, playing board games and hanging out until it was time to watch the ball drop.