Thanks to Sauder for sponsoring this post!

We declared the basement finished a few weeks ago, but, of course, nothing is ever really finished. I mean, in the house. But you could take that as some sort of super deep philosophical statement about life, too. If you want.

Two things I’d always planned to add to the basement at some point were an end table of some sort for setting drinks and stuff on and more yellow things. Yellow was always supposed to be an accent color in here, but then we kind of messed it up by….not putting yellow things in here. Except for the Grosse Pointe Blank poster. It’s lonely.

So it seemed kind of meant to be when I got the chance to pick out some furniture to try from Sauder and this yellow end table from their Soft Modern Collection was one of the choices. Yellow! End table! Perfect!

This is our first piece of Sauder furniture, and I was impressed when it got here both by the quality (all metal and seems very sturdy) and by how easy it was to put together. All I had to do was attach the legs with the included screws and allen wrench; took all of five minutes. The modern look is perfect for the basement, too: the room where I suddenly pretend we live in a loft in a hip city somewhere. And it retails for less than $100, so all in a all a great little piece for a more than reasonable price.

That picture up there is not from its final landing spot in the basement. I took it in my master bedroom, where the light is much better (and the walls happen to be the same color as in the basement, so it’s easy to pretend). The table’s small size made it both fun and a challenge to style; a lot of things I tried out in it were too big. But it also gave me a place to show off at least one piece of my perhaps too extensive collection of little brass animals without it getting lost in the too big scale.

I ended up, for the photo above, with a couple of pictures borrowed from Ari’s room, a succulent in a gold painted pot, a vintage copy of The Oxford Companion to American Literature, and the aforementioned little brass elephant, plus a stack of books underneath.

When I disassembled everything and took it downstairs, I went with a more minimalist little display…partially because it was no longer against a wall that pictures could lean against, and partially in anticipation of all those drinks we want to set on there when we watch movies (it also has a little drawer, perfect for keeping remotes in).

Here’s what the space looked like pre-table:

And now:

It’s not a huge change to the look of the room, but that’s what I like about it: it looks like it’s always been there. (The basket of throws is on the other side of the futon now, with the red dinosaur standing guard).

So, uhh….NOW the basement is finished? We’ll see.

Check out the Soft Modern Collection (and the other offerings from Sauder) here. Or follow them on Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of Sauder. The opinions and text are all mine.