The Ugly Wall

We have one wall in the house that is particularly ugly. And we’re not quite sure how to fix it. At least yet…

Every time someone comes over to see the progress of the basement, we get pretty excited to show it off. Especially now that the carpet is in. Except there is one part of the basement I don’t think neither Tim nor I are quite proud of yet: the wall at the bottom of the stairs aka the ugly wall. It’s the first thing everyone sees when heading downstairs, and there’s no way of covering it up. At least not yet…we’re working on that solution. The wall is concrete and there had to be some patching done to it, hence all of the dark spots.

Can you see Ferrah? She was sitting on her favorite ledge, trying to get in the picture. Or maybe you didn’t notice because the pretty new carpet was catching your eyes 😉 Btw, that blue wall was a pain in my rear end to paint. I had to rest a ladder on the stairs and climb up it to get the very top near the ceiling. Not fun.

Anyway, there will be a ledge/divider between the finished ugly wall and the blue paint to help that transition. Much like the strip going diagonally across the photo below in the upper left hand corner. Maybe one that sticks out a couple inches to rest a framed piece of art on or something. As for the wall itself, we’ve mentioned tiling it, making it a chalkboard wall, extending the tan paint from the walls down on both sides, or even extending the blue paint all the way down that one wall. Even though we ripped out a bunch of paneling during the basement demo, I suggested putting up white wainscoting. Tim wasn’t too fond of that idea at all. So right now my vote is to extend the tan paint down into the landing.

Except there’s two slight problems…
1) The previous owners left us a small, unmarked plastic jar of left over tan paint. No paint name, no store, nothing. So, we’ll have to take the paint in to our local Home Depot or Lowes and hope they can color match from actual paint. We are also thinking about going to both stores and taking as many paper color samples as possible in hopes of finding a match.
2) The second slight problem is that when the wall got patched up, it wasn’t done with much care. As in, the filler cement was never smoothed out, so we’re left with some super bumpy spots. More so than normal concrete surfaces.

So my fear is painting the wall and having it look totally janked because of the bumpy spots. Tim said we may be able to smooth it out somehow. I don’t see that being too successful, but I’ll keep an open mind. This part of the basement isn’t quite at the top of our priority list, even though it should be since it’s the first thing people see when heading downstairs. We also can’t put a railing back on until this is done, so maybe we’ll bump it up for other people’s safety. We don’t need anyone falling down the stairs and hitting their head on the Ugly Wall.

—m.