In this post, I show my workout room makeover and items used to transform my small room into the home gym of my dreams! When I put in the offer for my current home, I imagined the main bedroom in the basement and right across the hall would be a meditation room! Oh yes, I was going to have a space to do yoga in and calmly wake up just a few feet out of my bedroom door.
Sadly, the boxspring wouldn’t fit down the stairs and other things have caused me to change the vision for this house. It has 2 main-floor bedrooms and 1 full bedroom and a small non-conforming bedroom in the basement. The main floor bedrooms are now the main bedroom and an office. The basement bedroom is a guest bedroom currently and the small non-conforming bedroom was free for music and exercise.
I moved in with only a TreadClimber, 2 3-lb hand weights, and a few floor Pilates pieces. I had a spare tv that could have been used in either room in the basement. When I moved in I had a gym membership at a very large gym and the house is across from a park with both bike and walking paths so it really wasn’t a priority to have a gym. Then 2020 hit and things got weird in the gyms. The Pilates director retired, my Pilates instructor started his own small gym, and the rules for gyms were a bit erratic.
Why do a workout room makeover?
I started replacing my gym membership in various stages and bought equipment during the following two years. There were places with worse restrictions on gyms and I still had the great outdoors! However, I have a disorder that makes it difficult to keep increasing my tolerance while not injuring myself so a home gym lets me do a workout for as short as I need to and whenever I can. Namely: schedule flexibility, dedicated equipment, and less overall time.
My gym was no fun to spend any time in and I had to listen to headphones or watch my small phone screen if I wanted to watch anything. It was time to do a makeover!
The starting point: a small nonconforming basement bedroom
When I moved in, this room had become “the box room”. It’s where everything I didn’t know where it would belong went. The movers moved it all there, out of the way of other spaces. Over the following four years, I worked through all the items stored there. There were kitchen items originally since I had remodeled the kitchen when I moved in.
I had three categories of things in this room at the beginning of the project. The first is décor. I had extra paintings and wall hangings specifically in the closet. The second is music. I have many musical instruments and the appropriate sheet music and accessories. Third, I had some tech cords and a microphone for the keyboard I was gifted as a present, though the keyboard itself was upstairs in the office closet.
Decluttering: Relocating or donating unrelated items
Decluttering often includes finishing projects. I needed to hang things or find their actual home in the finished closet. I needed to put both bedrooms together to know what I would need.
There is a lot of identity clutter in this room. It’s mostly the musical instruments. I haven’t been able to tolerate playing in bands since the car accident but it’s been a while since I tried. This part of my life might be over. It’s hard to know when a change has become permanent enough to declutter it. These instruments range in cost from $200-1400 per, so it won’t be cheap to get back into. For now, I’ve relocated them.
I’ve decluttered so many things out of this room but it was a truly slow process. It takes some trial time to make sure that items are no longer part of my life.
Designating the Room:
Mixed rooms need a purpose. This room is now an exercise room/home gym. There will be some extra storage space in the closet so I will continue to store my music there so I could practice in that room if I get back into woodwind instruments.
Equipment:
I’ll cover what equipment I recommend in the next post, but here I’ll just let you know what equipment I started with and which ones I acquired to fill out my workout routine.
Equipment I already had:
- Treadclimber (mostly used as a treadmill)
- Spin bike
- Bench (not a workout bench)
- 3-lb hand weights
- 24-lb 3-segment weighted Pilates bar
- Resistance band kit (with handles, footholds, and over-the-door loop)
- Television (not installed)
- TV mount (not installed)
What equipment I was missing to complete my routine:
- Independent cable stacks with min 3 heights
- Large inflatable ball
- Kettlebell 15 lbs
- Rope pull (to keep wrist posture post-injury)
- Mirrors (to see posture)
- Speakers for music
- Clock (breaks between reps)
In the third post, I’ll discuss in-depth reasons why I made the compromises I did and which ones work for me, and why they might not work for you.
It’s important to know that buying “the thing” that you think will make working out fun, is never going to be “the thing”. I can say this from experience. While some equipment has been used enough to make it worth its cost in the end, not a bit of it has changed my life. I truly believe that a workout space is a perfect area to challenge yourself to spend as little as possible. If you think you want to try something, find the cheapest way first. If it proves itself valuable, then incorporate it.
People ditch equipment all the time. Whatever ad I saw that popped into my field of vision at the right time, probably when I was on my first weight loss journey in my twenties, won against my own common sense. Even this many years later, I really think learning how to dress appropriately for outdoor walking is far better for our health. Invest in some key pieces of clothing.
Elements of the makeover:
My main goal was to make the room comfortable to be in for 20 minutes to an hour. I also needed to get access to YouTube so that I could access the free exercises that are available there. This could include cycling programs, entertainment while walking, or even yoga or gentle stretches. I wanted to be able to cheaply replicate my gym workout to continue to build my muscle strength, so I needed some free space to do basic exercises.
I opted to not mount any hooks for resistance bands, which do exist but are rather expensive to cover the 3 areas I needed. Instead, I need length in front of the doorway to be free. This also allowed the equipment to be further from the television for better viewing.
Ultimately, I decided to place the tv rather high on the wall as the room is short and it made for a better viewing angle for both the bike and the TreadClimber. My basic door resistance band exercises didn’t need to view the television.
I added another Sonos speaker down here as well. This was possibly an overkill move, but the basement currently has no connected speakers and Sonos has such great sound. I love to use music to walk to, so I happened upon a used Sonos Beam gen 1 that someone was getting rid of to upgrade to an arc. This is the first deal on Marketplace. I was able to get a wonderful speaker for over $100 less than retail. The mount was unfortunately $25 on Amazon, but it’s such a good touch to the room. I’m very happy.
I had already acquired a tv mount and was about to install the old television from 2008 when it went out on me (thankfully before I drilled holes). So I jumped back onto Marketplace and acquired a new television from someone for $60. I could have gotten a cheaper deal but I’m very happy with this television. The only problem is that it required a different mount, and again I had to go to Amazon for this. Another $16 down and I was back in business. This television wasn’t perfect for this mount as the HDMI arc cable to the speaker didn’t allow the television to mount as planned but per their awful design. You can check out the behind-the-scenes photos below. Now I’ll have to resell the original television mount.
My favorite element was the cheapest for me. I had received a large kit of pegboard hooks and such for Christmas a few years ago and had only used a few of them in my broom closet up to this point. Then I stumbled upon a pegboard that had been spraypainted black that someone was selling on Marketplace for $10, so I picked that up and built out the wall to store all my resistance band accessories and my weight training tracker on! It wasn’t in pristine condition but very few holes were ruined and it already had holes drilled through for mounting.
This is by far my favorite part of the makeover, and ultimately the cheapest for me.
Then the depth of the closet was an asset for storing the giant body ball too. Normally these balls get in the way but I happened to have a tension curtain rod that I could use to rest the ball on at the second shelf height making the ball very accessible, well-contained, and not at all in the way! Perfect!
The finishing Touches:
The last part was installing the flexible mirror wall tiles. I went in this direction because I thought they would work as well and be lighter. Therefore less likely to damage the wall when they inevitably had to be removed.
I purchased 2 sets of 8 10-inch tiles and stuck them with two rings of painter’s tape to figure out where they needed to go, so I could test out how to place them for posture checking my resistance training workout.
Then, I needed to swap out the painter’s tape for something more permanent and I opted for Command Strips (velcro), though I hadn’t had the best luck with them prior. For other uses for Command Hook products, check out this post I did in my hall closet. This was another $20 into the project for just the mounting strips, but I couldn’t afford to peel up that much of the drywall trying to remove the cheap foam pads that came with them.
For a final detail, I had my racing medal sign sitting in this room waiting to find a home. While it could be very motivational to see when on the treadmill, the tv really was taking that prime real estate, so I opted to place it where I’d see it first when walking into the room and while doing half of the resistance band exercises.
Before I started this project, the water meter in the other bedroom had burst and damaged the drywall, so things were shuffled in a frenzy to this workout room and I slowly had to find more permanent homes for those items as it’s been over two months and I haven’t been able to repair the room yet. The only piece I can’t relocate is the mattress. The other half of the basement has fairly regular water leak issues and I can’t risk the mattress getting wet so it’s just sliding between the rooms right now. I can’t wait to get the full room back, but in the meantime, I’m still able to use the room and enjoy it immensely.