Down Under at Home

Australia was the impetus for last year's trip, but that isn't the "down under" I'm referring to. We have been back home for nearly a year now and, for the past several months, we have been having our unfinished basement... finished.

We let enough of it remain unfinished so as to still have lots of storage space as well as a workshop, but the bulk of it was transformed into a theater, game and exercise rooms and, my personal favorite, a bar. My vision for the bar area was to have a place to stash and display the many, many knick-knacks, reference books, pamphlets, maps and other odds and ends that we have collected from along the way from all of our travels. Since these things come from all over the globe, I suppose I could also call our basement the Underworld.

I think it turned out pretty well... here's a look:

The display case

A closer look at the "stuff"

A well-traveled rugby football

Pub table with a couple of collages

The bar

The "tip jar"...
it contains the coins and currency
that we never converted back to USD

The sink was inspired by some of
the places we stayed in Asia

The shower was patterned

after one in South Africa

I had hoped to put in a potty with a distinctively European style and a hard-to-figure-out flushing mechanism, but the cost and availability of such turned out to be prohibitive. Sooo.. we have a regular ol' potty.

The basement has instantly become my favorite part of the house and gives us a place to re-live our travels. 

Taking a flight of fancy is as simple as going down a flight of stairs.