The Tolman Family: Storage Room Home Gym Transformation

I've kept my elliptical and weight bench in the storage room since we moved into this house, and that's where I've been exercising. But a few weeks ago, I was feeling like the storage room is such a dark and dreary place to exercise, surrounded by shelves of lots of junk. I threw the idea out to Justin that I could just paint a couple walls in my little exercise area to help cheer it up, and he took the idea and ran. He said if we're going to do a transformation, we're going to do it right!

So we moved my elliptical into a different nook of the storage room that would be easier to transform and then we got to work. In the meantime, we found a killer deal on a treadmill on craigslist, so we snatched that up to make our room even more complete, and more appealing to Justin, who hates my elliptical.

My goal was to create a room that was bright and sunshiny, and that would invigorate me each morning when I exercise. Here's a quick before and after, then you can keep scrolling to see the process.

BEFORE and AFTER

This is the TRUE "before" picture. You can see the handle of my elliptical on the right where I used to keep it. All the storage in the back (mostly baby clothes and gear) has been moved to where my elliptical is in the picture or has been discarded, sold, or donated.

Moved Christmas decorations on those shelves to where the elliptical used to be. I have tons of open shelves after getting rid of lots of junk! Feels so great!

What a dungeon of a workout space!

That's our sump pit and sump pump, along with our water meter and water lines to the house and the yard. Gotta cover that ugly stuff up!

Got the primer and concrete sealant on the walls.

Justin built a box to cover the sump pit and water meter.

The finished, but unpainted, box.

Justin installed an outlet back in the space to power the elliptical and treadmill. He spliced it in from an outlet on the other side of the wall in Lexie's room. This way it's also on a different breaker from the rest of the storage room. Justin discovered earlier that the storage room breaker trips if the treadmill is running when our storage room freezer kicks on. So now we won't be overloading any breakers.

I was planning to do a cheaper and easier remodel of the ceiling, but Justin thought we ought to make it all look really nice. So we bought ceiling tiles to cover the ceiling. This was by far the hardest part of the entire project, and the part that cost the most, but the finished ceiling looks great! Here, Justin is hanging the framework that the tiles rest in.

Getting the ceiling framework up.

I wanted more light back in this area, instead of just one exposed bulb, so we put in two can lights with LED bulbs.

Getting a can light situated in the ceiling tile.

Both can lights are installed and ceiling is coming along. I painted the yellow and white walls to bring a cheerful, sunshiny feel to the room.

I painted the floor with a heavy duty floor paint. It made the concrete floor look so much nicer and cleaner!

I didn't want to be staring out at my storage shelves while exercising, so I sewed these drapes to create a doorway into the workout area.

I sewed matching drapes to cover the water pipes and sump pump pipes. this makes it easy to just pull aside the drape when we need to turn the water off to the house or drain our sprinkler system each winter. And the lid of the white box is easily removable so we can access the sump pit or water meter if we need to.