Since our house only has one bedroom, and it is kind of funny that someone would build a one bedroom home, we felt it was a priority to create a second bedroom for guests… and possibly for me when I got in trouble. Unfortunately, this was just after we purchased the house and money was tight. So we got creative. There was already a room in the basement that the previous owner used as a sewing room. It was completely framed out, dry walled (including the ceiling), although the floor was cement and it didn’t have any closets. The room was also covered in some fugly wallpaper that contained different kinds of fruit on it. Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “before” pictures of the room and that crazy wallpaper.
After our previous wallpaper experience in the living room, this time we decided to forgo chemicals and rent a steamer from Home Depot. The steamer cost a little cash money to rent, but the wallpaper came off so fast with it compared to that DIF crap, we got the whole room de-wallpapered in a couple hours. Here is the first picture of the room I have with the wallpaper down.
After experiencing the joy of scraping off tiny little pieces of wallpaper for hour after hour, the steamer was worth every penny it cost to rent. This is the other wall with all the wallpaper removed.
The walls were old, uneven, and bumpy, so our choices were to: 1) paint it as is and let the room look like it was built as a kindergarten class project, 2) rip down the old dry wall, put up new dry wall, and paint, or 3) (ugh) put up new wallpaper and hope it covers up the small imperfections. I’m not an option (1) kind of guy and (2) was a little expensive, time consuming, and since I’ve never put up drywall before it could end up looking just like option (1). So, despite I hate all that is wallpaper
To make sure that we covered up all the bad looking walls, we (read: my wife, the one with actual design ability) bought some grass cloth wallpaper from Sherwin Williams. Grass cloth is quite thick and has the texture of woven dried grass – perfect for those walls. It requires special glue though - glue that you have to paint on with a roller or paint brush. Because of that, the wallpaper install ended up taking the remainder of the weekend. If you do ever put up grass cloth, the most difficult thing for us was that you only have a limited time to adjust the wallpaper on the wall before the glue bonds. Maybe 5 to 10 seconds. Also, since it’s so thick, bubbles want to form in the middle of sheets when you’re putting it up. Have a roller ready to smooth the bubbles out before the glue dries. Here is the wallpaper finally up.
After the wallpaper was up, we bought some pre-cut carpet at a discount store and cheap white trim at Home Depot. I “installed” the carpet myself, which basically consisted on me cutting it to size (not an easy job since the room is slightly crooked and I didn’t have proper tools). I laid foam and then the carpet in the room without actually securing it to the sides. As you can see in the picture below, the carpet was a cheap fix and it will be replaced when we refinish our basement. It looks alright for a temporary thing.
Since we didn’t have a lot of money at the time, our goal was to cheaply create a room that looked like and could be used as a bedroom. Also, the room doesn’t have any closets yet, but we plan on adding them when the basement is finished. That story will come later, but until then, for about $250, here is what we ended up with.
Final Costs:
Steamer Rental: $35
Grass Paper: $120
Glue: $15
Trim: $20
Carpet: $50
Miscellaneous Supplies: $10
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