Home Gym Progress

I am really excited to share our first semi-finished room in the basement.  We have a home gym!

Here is the before pic of the space…there in the back behind the framed wall:

We focused on working on our home gym first for a couple of reasons:

• Fitness is important to us.  During the basement finishing we did not have use of our treadmill for months.  Once all the drywall, painting, and electrical were done, the treadmill was the fist thing we plugged in.  It was great to have it back, but working out in an unfinished room was a downer.
• The finishes in this room were simple and easy to DIY.  It was nice to start with a space we could finish quickly and build up steam to tackle the rest of the basement.

I mentioned it is semi-finished, because we still lack baseboards and doors throughout the basement.  We hope to tackle those soon, but in the meantime the home gym will have a few rough edges.

So, why a home gym?  We have previously had gym memberships, but found ourselves finding excuses, especially in the winter, for not venturing out to the gym.  Now that we have two young boys, we find it even harder to sneak away for the workout.  With a gym right at home we can fit in a workout early in the morning before work or in the evening after the kids go to bed.  This one definitely fits with one of our 2012 Home Goals to “bring it home”.  Why pay monthly for a gym membership we were hardly using?  Instead we created our own gym in the comfort of our own home.  It is pretty hard to come up with a legitimate excuse for missing a workout now.

We are really happy with how the space is turning out and I wanted to share some pictures with your today.  In this room we made a deviation from our self-imposed white box challenge (we are keeping most walls in the basement white).  This space is in the back of the basement and has no natural light.  We felt the white walls with artificial lighting was too sterile.  We chose a light blue called Sparkling Brook by Martha Stewart, shown here with the other home gym and basement finishes.

My husband led the color choice in here and I whole-heartedly agreed with his decision.  He had done a bit of research and learned of studies where athletes worked out harder or performed better in blue or black rooms.  Since black was out of the question, at least on the walls, blue it was.

The flooring we put down is charcoal grey/black utility tiles.  They are the Apache Mills Plush Tiles available at Home Depot.  They are a very thick rubber (made of recycled tires) topped with a carpeted material.  They lock together like giant puzzle pieces.  Other than a slight variation in coloring they create a pretty seamless look for the floor (never mind the dust in these in progress pictures).

We laid the tiles directly over the cement floor and took them wall to wall.  The tiles can be cut to size easily with a utility knife.  Once the baseboard is in here we think it will look pretty sophisticated.  In this 10′ x 15′ space the total cost for the floor tiles was about $385.  We used 11 boxes of tiles.  Unfortunately, each Home Depot only stocks like 6 boxes at most.  We made two trips to our local Home Depot on different occasions to stock up and then had to drive to another nearby Home Depot to get the last 5 boxes.

Our wish list for furnishing this space was simple and knocked out in one successful trip to Ikea.  Instead of doing a full mirrored wall you might see in a real gym, I wanted to install several full length mirrors for a more elegant look.  We also wanted a small cabinet in the room to hold the TV and provide some concealed storage.  Other than that we wanted to leave lots of open floor space for working out.

We really like the clean, modern lines of the Stave mirror.   We picked up 3 of the floor length 27″ x 63″ Stave mirrors for $49.99 each.  We hung the trio of mirrors equidistant apart on the short wall to the left when you enter the gym.  Not only are they great for checking your form when working out, but the reflection helps make the space feel larger.  Mirrors are so great in a room without windows, because their shape and light reflective properties can mimic a window.  Our upscale mirrored home gym wall was accomplished for $150!

For the TV cabinet, we had our eyes set on the Ikea PS locker cabinet in white.  The locker style is cool for a home gym without being cheesy.  We were a bit disappointed when we saw it in the store, because it is more of a cream color than true white.  Thankfully we both got excited about the red version!  This basement is all about fun and although I have a love/hate relationship with red, I was all over this red cabinet.  It was the perfect amount of punch for the gym.  Let’s admit it, the white cabinet would have been b-o-r-i-n-g.

The TV on top of the console was the one we moved from our bedroom, giving us the excuse to buy a new bedroom TV.  This older white TV is the perfect size for the home gym for a background show or workout video.  I love the shape of this little TV and I think it looks so modern retro and fun on top of the red cabinet.

It was a happy accident when putting together the red locker, that we noticed we had a nice grey, red, and white color scheme going.  The workout bench my husband found for the space was grey with a touch of red.  The kettle bells we already owned are charcoal and red.  It all came together so effortlessly.  I appreciate that there aren’t a bunch of mismatched crazy gym equipment colors in here.

I’ll be back tomorrow for some details on the baskets hanging on the wall.