Unemployed does Renovations!

I love home decorating shows.  My favourite being Moving Up.  I am fascinated as much by Doug's changing hairstyles as the actual renovations being done.  My newest dream is for the old owners to come back and see this house after we are finished painting and decorating to see what they think.  They always get people to describe their style.  Once I watched one and they said they were going to make their house Asian meets Country.  My style?  Shades of Beige.  I just want plain relaxing colours so this house can stop giving me an instant headache. 
Since we moved in last weekend we have been working hard trying to make this house liveable.  The colour and decoration choices of the last people were horrendous.  It has led me to question the entire neighbourhood because one afternoon our neighbour was chatting and said, "well at least you don't have any repainting to do".  I assume he has seen the house, or else why would he say that?  But how could he have seen the house and think there was no work to be done?  Does he also have a giant spaceship/adult playground mirror on his ceiling?

We have had quite a few setbacks - for example, the people who lived here last didn't believe in nailing anything to walls, instead all of the lovely decorations were glued up.  The only room we have finished so far is the basement.  Or what was previously known as the adult entertainment room.  I am going to share some terrifying pictures with you, please prepare yourselves.  Then I will show you the after pictures!  Hopefully sometime before Christmas we will have 'after' pictures of the entire house because I am starting to go a little crazy here.

Yes, this was really our basement ceiling.

Yay!  Family pictures in the ceiling mirror!

Remember how I said everything was glued?  Well that giant 'X' and the frame on the ceiling around the mirror are glued down.  We actually can't even find a break in the wood, so apparently it was constructed in one piece and somehow magically brought into the house.  It was most likely aliens that did it.  Aliens who wanted the ceiling of their basement to remind themselves of the mother ship.  That is the only possible explanation for this.  We can't get rid of the X and frame without ripping out the entire ceiling.  Instead we painted it out, hoping to make it disappear.  The trim was all done in black, which I changed to white.  Even though everybody loves black trim in a dark basement, it is known to really lighten the room....

But where will the sex swing go? (That's what the old owners would say if they were to come back in a Moving Up scenario)

I'm not going to lie.  I do wish the ceiling could just look like a ceiling.  Apparently this is not possible.  But we did get some sweet new Ikea shelves.  The only question left to ask is, 'how did you get that lovely couch down into the basement?'

Nobody really wanted that light there did they?