Any interior decorators here?

I'm completely redoing my upstairs. I've got all the outlets, lighting, insulation, and drywall up, and now it's just down to finishing the drywall, paint, floors, and trim. I'm planning on putting up some small walls around the stairwell opening (about 30" high), sanding down and refinishing the floors, and adding a base board and window trim that are stained to match the floor. My question is, how would you paint this room? It's primary function is music and entertainment. The drums are going to stay approximately where they are and the guitars and amps will like the walls around it. We are also thinking of putting a large tv and stereo system opposite of the couch. Out that window you have a nice view of my garage and the woods.

For reference, I think this room is probably somewhere around 17' x 28'-ish.

Paint the walls whatever color you want, throw down some cheap carpet, put some egg crate on the walls, and in between the egg crate, place these things everywhere:

With all the miatas this place has, you'd think one owner would be an interior designer?!?!?

(Says the guy with a Miata)

Lighter colors up top- I'm thinking red for the truly vertical surfaces. Ceilings like that tend to feel closed in the darker they are, so leave it as light/white as possible. Red will look good with the lighter floor as well. Maybe a burgundy/wine color.

Pseudonym wrote: Paint the walls whatever color you want, throw down some cheap carpet, put some egg crate on the walls, and in between the egg crate, place these things everywhere:

Most definitely. I've already got four of these waiting to go up after the paint.

And I heavily insulated the walls, so it should be fairly sound-proof.

Paint the flat ceiling and the sloped walls pure white. We live in a Cape Cod house and if those slopes are colored, they really intrude into the room.

Technically, the guard walls (or railing) around the stair opening needs to be 42" high. In case any of your friends are building inspectors, or anything. If you don't expect to ever see one of those, you can make them lower, but you didn't hear that from me.

You may want to do the low side walls in a fairly light neutral color, and accent the gable ends with a darker color like the red (or whatever your favorite is). It's a long low room and the horizontal band of the knee walls will just overemphasize that if they are too dark. Making the end walls the accent will pull them in a little.

Also, if you go with a dark accent color, don't go so dark that you need a neutral base - the paint counter person should be able to help you with that. Dark colors often need a transparent base vehicle, which means you need molto many coats or else it looks like ass. Get the darkest you can get in a white base that has T2O in it for good opaque coverage.

mndsm wrote: Lighter colors up top- I'm thinking red for the truly vertical surfaces. Ceilings like that tend to feel closed in the darker they are, so leave it as light/white as possible. Red will look good with the lighter floor as well. Maybe a burgundy/wine color.

The ceiling is definitely going white, just not sure about the walls.

In reply to RossD:

Dang, I was going to say that.

Slow edit on my part. Info added above ^^^.

Awesome. I hope my attic looks like this one day. Right now, it's bare beams and blown in insulation, peppered with bat and squirrel turds.

Lesley wrote: Awesome. I hope my attic looks like this one day. Right now, it's bare beams and blown in insulation, peppered with bat and squirrel turds.

That's not too far off of what that looked like. It did have a floor and some REALLY haphazardly installed drywall, and downright scary lights and outlets. Oh, and zero insulation accept a little blow-in on the floor of the crawl space. That all got scooped up with the raccoon turds. I'll have to dig out my before and during pics.

Keep it all white dude. You've played in dark ass clubs, right? OR: Cover the walls in carpet remnants. We did this in a practice space in an industrial park once, and not only did it act as a great diffuser, we put enough thought into it that it looked really cool.

I'm pretty good at this so I will give it a shot. Here is a picture of my kitchen I interior designed all by myself last winter:

My advice is to paint that room white and park a Ducati 916 in the corner.

The room over my garage looks surprisingly similar. I'll have to check but I think everything is white.

Duke wrote: Technically, the guard walls (or railing) around the stair opening needs to be 42" high. In case any of your friends are building inspectors, or anything. If you don't expect to ever see one of those, you can make them lower, but you didn't hear that from me.

I'd think about using a railing with balusters instead of solid walls - they'll visually cut the room in half.

just get whatever version of white paint is on sale at the hardware store... put up nekkid girl posters if you need decoration..

I have almost the exact same room. I went with olive on the verticals and white ceiling. I dig it.

This pic is after the GF set it up as a spare room. The guitars and drums are on the not pictured side

My verticals are not tall enough to be able to use string swings though

bwh998 wrote: I'm pretty good at this so I will give it a shot. Here is a picture of my kitchen I interior designed all by myself last winter: My advice is to paint that room white and park a Ducati 916 in the corner.

BERK YEA!

Any room is better with an exotic superbike in it.

White ceilings with an almost imperceptible blue mixed in it. Takes the harshness out and "feels" good.

I'm late to this thread ... and the only thing I have offer is ... there are a lot of Miata drivers on this web site, so there should be a plethora of interior decorators to choose from ...

If you put a line, pin stripe or wall paper border, at the top of the hip wall it would tend to draw your eye left and right, making the room appear less tunnel like.

If you want the white to be whiter and vbrighter, put a few drops of red in it.

I dealt with a similar space a couple of years back. For my situation, at the 45 degree angle where the short vertical walls met the sloped ceiling, the seam was not precise. I felt that if I did a color change there it would come out looking wavy, so... I painted the ceilings and the short walls all in the same color. I went with a resale beige, I think called antique white (not really white, not really tan.) It worked very well. Not only did it make the job easier, it blurred the concept of where the walls stopped and where the ceiling started.
If you do want accent color, paint the end walls (where the windows are) with color.

For the walls you plan to build for the stair opening:
If you build these walls, you may end up with what feels like 2 separate spaces. My first house was similar situation but had outdoor metal railing used inside. The railing was painted the interior color which helped it look more appropriate for the space. The benefit was that you could see through the railing and therefore, it did not break up the space.
Something of this concept as fancy or simple as you want it:

JohnRW1621 wrote: For my situation, at the 45 degree angle where the short vertical walls met the sloped ceiling, the seam was not precise. I felt that if I did a color change there it would come out looking wavy, so... I painted the ceilings and the short walls all in the same color.

My seams are definitely wavy, but the seams are still about two or three skim coats of mud before I get to paint, so I should be able to straighten them out quite a bit. I actually thought that having different colors would help the fact that the seams aren't perfect, since I could tape it off paint a perfectly straight line. Even if the seam wasn't straight, the color would be, so if would trick you into believing that the seam was straight. That was my theory anyway.

JohnRW1621 wrote: For the walls you plan to build for the stair opening: If you build these walls, you may end up with what feels like 2 separate spaces. My first house was similar situation but had outdoor metal railing used inside. The railing was painted the interior color which helped it look more appropriate for the space. The benefit was that you could see through the railing and therefore, it did not break up the space.

That is definitely a concern of mine. I originally thought about going with more of a railing style wall, but after searching google images I couldn't find anything that I liked the look of. This is kind of what I had in mind, but if I found another style that I like I wouldn't be opposed to changing plans.

I your picture above, see those little doors? Do you have the ability to add similar.
My first house had them and they were a great space to store christmas decorations and rarely used items.
The owner before installed the doors. He used cheap Luann, pre-hung doors and then with a table saw, shortened them from the bottom to the proper height. The doors were manufactured with no knob hole, rather, the handle was a typical kitchen cabinet pull knob and the cabinet magnets were used to hold them in place.

I like those stair walls. Also, this design will be more conducive to a proper hand railing which will be important if you ever sell the house via FHA.