Quarantine Productivity: Hobbies and House Projects

I knew during quarantine that I needed to keep busy, and I knew that I wanted to do more things that would distract me from stress, anxiety and life's issues. As I blogged about earlier I renewed my car hobby and started pushing on work getting done to finish my Datsun 280z (more on that soon), collecting Hot Wheels and just working around the house. Plus I wanted more meaningful time with the kids, so I grabbed dudeman (Cruz) and said lets remodel the basement!

So what was once just storage, then storage plus weight bench, then storage, weight bench, workshop and spare TV room... got cleaned up. It meant a few background things, we needed to organize our storage area, so more storage could fit there (we had a successful quarantine garage sale) and do some needed repair work to make the basement more "finished". When we bought the house is was partially finished and while I am sure it would still be labeled that, it is slightly more now.

What started it all was that I wanted to replace the floor tiles. They were chipped and coming up, and I found some garage/basement floor tiles I thought would be quick and easy. Well you know nothing worth doing is quick and easy... and in my typical, "If you give a mouse a cookie" style the floor turned into painting walls, fixing some ceiling tiles, and then totally redecorating the room. I wanted to do it on a budget and so it was a lot of repurposed furniture, some resale finds, and painting things to match my theme.

Cruz loves to learn and work with me. He helped me clean and sand things, solved problems, measured, worked on his math, and gave ideas on things to decorate. Reminded me of N at his age, she loved projects and helping me work on my cars or the house. M is a tad too young to be helpful, and she didn't want to help anyways so we both won... ha.

So what all did we do? Well we painted, including an old wood paneled wall. We ripped up tile, sealed the floor, and put in some snap tile designed for garages. We ended up doing about 2/3s of the basement not just the new "Car Cave" as Cruz dubbed the space.

Paint... the walls were yellow, yes like canary yellow. We patched a little, and decided to paint most of the room white but to do the wood paneled wall in grey and part of one partial wall to color block the space. A dark red accent color we did on the registers and it tied into all the art well and we carried it over to other parts of the room.

Art... I bought a couple big frames, but mostly grabbed used frames we had in the house and art I either had already had or things I got for Cruz's room we ended up not using. I spent the most on the cool Datsun print that I put over the futon.

Furniture... the futon was the bottom of my college bunk/loft. It needed a mattress and Cruz helped me custom make some arm rests for it (he painted them red). I had a pair of ugly green vinyl chairs I bought years ago, finally took them out, dyed the chairs grey (N picked that over black which was my idea, she was right) and polished the chrome on them. I then scored a used wooden display shelf that had a clock on it. I took the clock out, mounted the license plate from my last race car and painted the shelf black... it now houses a few Datsun model cars.

Hot Wheels... to display my expanded hobby I made Hot Wheels some of the accents around the room. I custom made some shelves for loose cars and got a collector display. Interestingly all three kids have really gotten into collecting so that turned into some side fun as part of this as well.

Rims... not finished yet but I have always wanted to make some furniture out of rims. I have three wheels off my NX2000, the first car I autocrossed. I am testing some ideas on how to make them into end tables, and working on an idea for spare wheels I got to be a coffee table. More on that in the future... but the one table is there for now.

I put in a bunch of all of my favorite car things... racing, Nissans/Datsun, MOMO, some trophies, Hot Wheels, and a couple collages of racing pics with my dad and other family and friends (Team PLP!) who attended events.

Finally as the project finished I celebrated the completion with a car themed movie night... no one else wanted to watch, but dudeman and I watched Ford vs. Ferrari (we both give it a thumbs up), ate popcorn and then I gave him his own GT40... a Hot Wheels GT40.

More pictures on my Facebook Page. https://www.facebook.com/cruceno21/media_set?set=a.10100584889174563&type=3