The Ula Lounge

I've finally made enough progress to start a thread for my basement tiki room. The room is 10 x 15' and is a little odd because it's kind of a walk through area between the main part of the basement and the mudroom, which leads to the garage. The name comes from a wooden lobster that a friend brought back from Fiji. (According to the Internet " Ula" is Hawaiian for lobster). Here are some before pictures when the room was powder blue.

The first thing we did was paint the room orange and hang up a large sheet of tapa cloth along one wall. These shots show the now painted room from the same angle as the originals next to them.

We had that setup for a few months and liked it pretty well, but last weekend decided to add some more details like matting on the wall. We're still working on that. Matting is up, and we started to add some bamboo around the bottom, but I had to stain the bamboo and the weather hasn't been so great for that lately, so I just have one section of 8 foot fencing done and just leaning sloppilly against the wall. Eventually it will wrap around the room. We also need to get rid of the white ceiling. I think we're just going to paint it a dark brown, but I've never attempted to paint a ceiling before, so I haven't been super motivated to tackle that even though it needs to be done. Here are some pictures of the room in its current state and the namesake lobster.

[ Edited by: Fugu 2017-02-12 22:06 ]

Wow! Looking good!

Impressive transformation! You make it look so fast and easy! And that lobster is badass.

Love what you have done.

Thanks for the kind words! It's definitely been fun and I love finally having my own tiki spot to hang out in.

@Prikli Pear: Don't let the pictures fool you; I didn't photograph all of the intermediate steps, so it looks like it went up a lot faster than it actually did. It took a long time (and lots of swearing) to get it this far along and there is still a lot of work to go :).

What a transformation!

Sweet
And cheers to u
Have fun

Jon

Absolutely love the color of the new room along with how you furnished it. Some very nice items. Hope you are enjoying it this summer and keeping cool! Thanks for the photos.

Love the orange walls! Very cool space. Painting the ceiling is not difficult; use a shielded roller to prevent splatter and take your time.
Looking forward to seeing what comes next!

Thanks for the advice, gitiki. Painting the ceiling is tentatively on the agenda for sometime in the next two weeks (finally). I'm still trying to decide exactly how I want to do it, and what color I want to use. I was originally thinking a dark brown and then at some point later down the road hanging some bamboo poles across, but then a friend suggested that a quicker and easier solution would be painting it the same orange as the wall and calling it a day. I can't quite decide what would be best. I'm open to any ideas at this point (as long as they are relatively inexpensive.)

If it were my room, I'd want it to feel intimate and cozy, and darker colors tend to help make a ceiling appear lower. It wouldn't necessarily need to be brown; maybe an orange a few shades darker than the wall color could work by giving the room another layer of dimension while still maintaining some consistency in the overall space.

Either way, your room is really well done, so however you decide to banish the white ceiling will just be, if you excuse the phrase, "icing on the cake."

Fun!! looking really nice! loving the orange !!!

Nice transformation. Fun project.