Painting the basement bar room

Thanks to a quiet weekend and a snow day yesterday, we were able to paint the bar room in the basement! We finished the drywall by ourselves and I am truly shocked at how well it turned out. I thought "this is an absolute disaster" while we were in the thick of it - taping, mudding, and sanding. It's amazing how much of a difference sanding makes. Back breaking work, but oh so important. The really good drywall finishers hardly have to sand because they are able to get the mud on so smooth. Yeah, that's obviously not us.


We spent a good chunk of yesterday cleaning the bar area and prepping it to paint. Drywall dust is a nightmare. End of story. We swept, used the shop vac, wiped the walls down with slightly damp grout sponges twice, and then followed up with the Swiffer which did a nice job of grabbing any remaining dust.

Our buckets and sponges that we used to wipe down the drywall. Do not get the walls too wet!

Here are the before primer pictures of the bar room:

I'm standing in the living room looking into the bar room.

Against that back wall there will be a fridge and countertop with sink. The ugly black pole will be covered and there will be the front bar running where it starts with four bar stools.

The doorway on the left leads to under the stairs (storage) and the doorway on the right leads to what will eventually be a second bedroom in the basement.

We will hopefully put a counter height table in this corner.

Here are the after primer pics:

I just used a primer that we had on hand - Zinsser.

Here are the final pics after two coats of paint:

Perfect Greige from Sherwin Williams is the color I chose. It is a little more tan than the swatch (I'm shooting for grays), but it's still a pretty color.

I think the barnwood ceiling now looks a million times better!

To see more pics of Perfect Greige, click here.

Special shout out to my momma for all of her help with this!

If you missed my post about how we installed a barnwood ceiling, check it out by clicking here. To see the living room painted, click here.