basement brainstorming

Hello everyone, it's snowing again here in southeast Michigan but we are doing our best to stay warm, we hope you all are doing the same! 

We are almost done with our bathroom (phase 1) and will be showing you that near the end of this week - we ended up running into a few time-consuming road blocks but we are well on our way now and we have had smooth sailing since we put our problem solving brains together. Let's clap our hands for team work! 

Now that the main areas of our house are feeling more and more settled we are starting to let our minds stray to the basement area, the lovely lovely basement. We have already done some basic organization (you can read about that here) and made some adjustments to the unfinished part of the basement (you can read about that here) but there is much to be accomplished before we would actually deem the "finished" section, finished. 

The first thing we would love to add in is a built in for the dogs and all of their stuff, including their food and bowls. It would make us so happy to have a place for everything, making our dog related clutter minimal!

Currently we have all the girl's meds (heartworm and flee) and other odd items in that plastic set of drawers with the plastic air tight food bin on top and their food bowls also live downstairs. I don't like that they have things spread throughout the house - they have a basket (or two) in our cubical storage unit in the den with toys and other odd things, they have bath stuff in the bathroom, and toys are all over the house. We need a space to keep it all while still being able to get to everything easily. 

The space is being used effectively but it's just plain ugly and as you can see from the reflection in the mirror, it's right across from the stairs. The stairs lead directly downstairs once you walk in the side door and this area is visible from the landing. Currently, it's an eyesore. 

Sidenote: the mirror was left behind by the previous tenant / owner. It was not a decorating choice on our part! 

      

After looking at lots of ideas like the ones above and merging some of those concepts together we have come up with a plan of attack. Now due to my lack of photoshop skills you will have to use your imagination to see what we see in our minds. 

The bottom drawer will be a pull out that holds the food bowls at a height they can easily eat from - which will be nice once they are a little older so they won't have to bend their necks! The big plus is that we will be able to hide their bowls for the majority of the day - they aren't grazing dogs, we just feed them twice a day so they don't need to get to their bowls all day long. 

The next area, moving up, that has one handle will be a tilt out food bin so we can hide that as well! 

On the shelves above we will add baskets and items to hold their toys, leashes, medicine, etc and we will be able to keep everything in one place! 

We are so excited to build this but we are going to wait until we decided what the flooring is going to become. We will definitely not be keeping this terrible diamond, hard as a rock carpet for the long haul so we want to get the built in adjusted for the new flooring. We are thinking cork flooring or a deeper plush carpet - we are hesitant to add carpet because there is a tendency for water (if it floods or overflows) to seep into the finished section. 

We just wanted to share this idea, get some ideas from you and start planning. We don't think this will be an expensive build but it will add great appeal to this area of our home. 

What do you think? Any suggestions for style or utilizing more storage capacity!? Let us know your thoughts, we would love to know!