Basement Fast Forward

Well, it has been quite a while since I posted last. Lots of things have happened since then. I will post a couple of times to get all of the information out there, but thought I would start with our basement construction. We are done! Well, mostly done anyway. (We have to paint the doors, do some touch up paint after the carpet was installed, and start furnishing it. The furnishing will be slow, since we have to save up again. At least we have some additional space to live in. We almost doubled the size of our house!)

I'll start from the beginning. Here is the basement when we started. Joe was working on the framing, while I was sorting and cleaning all of the things we had accumulated.

Here is another angle of the main area with "stuff".

This is a picture when most of the cleaning was done. The electrical had not been completed yet, but it looked brighter just having the area cleaned out. You can still see the area where Takoda (our old dog) had torn off the vapor barrier and started eating the insulation...

All that is left now is a trash pile in the middle of the room from the framing scraps.

Okay, well there is more stuff "hiding" in the other room. We made the decision to join our neighborhood garage sale this year, so I stored the things we were selling in the other room until the sale weekend. We were able to sell quite a bit and dropped the rest off at the Goodwill around the corner from us. I told Joe once the items were out of the house and in the garage they were not coming back in!

The kids liked coming downstairs to "help" Daddy with the framing. It was good for them to get involved with the construction. Makayla just looked pretty and watched.

Now all of the framing is done, the insulation is installed, as well as the electrical. I can't remember if the duct work was completed in this picture too, but if not it was completed shortly after. You can also see one of the three piles of drywall Joe hung.

We decided to finish room by room, so we could at least see some progress as we went along. The bathroom was the first room we were completing. (I was tired of all of the dirty shoe prints coming up the stairs to use the one in the hall...) You can see a little of the tile we installed in the bathroom in this picture too.

This is one of the many nights Joe spent hanging drywall in the theatre room. (Where the garage sale items were stored.)

We put in a tray ceiling that will have rope lights in this room. It was also a decorative way to hide the duct work in the ceiling!

This picture was taken at about 1:30 in the morning as we painted the bathroom. We had to wait until we put the kids in bed and took care of the dinner dishes and getting things ready for the next day before we could get down to do some painting.

And one room is done!

It started to look messier than it did before we started with construction for a while. There was so much trash, equipment, parts, etc. all around the basement. However, the more drywall Joe hung, the more it started to look like a finished basement.

The next room we painted was the theatre room. We also put in a kitchenette in the back of the room. We will eventually have an oven and refrigerator installed. There is also tile in front of the cabinets.

We went with two different shades of green. We wanted to make this room a little darker, since it will eventually have a projector for movies. The green blended nicely with the blue bathroom too!

The last room we painted is the game room. We chose two different browns. Most of the walls are in this lighter brown.

Here you can see the darker brown we painted on the back accent wall above the stone work.

In this picture, you can see the blue bathroom, the green theatre room, and the brown game room at the same time. We were getting closer to the end in this picture. There are also two large storage rooms that we created, but they are not as exciting to see as the rest of the rooms.

The last pieces we were working on before the carpet was installed was painting all of the trim work. There is a lot of trim to go along the floor and around all of the doors!

This is it, we have everything painted and are ready for carpet!

I can't believe the difference a few months of work can make!

The last three pictures were taken the night before the carpet was installed.

The carpet installation ended up being on Monday Aug 3rd. It was just in time too. Sean, Amy, and Nathan flew in from Utah on Wednesday Aug 5th for a visit. It was great to have a space for them to sleep and for the kids to play!

Of course the kids spent a bunch of time in the play area under the stairs. They seem pretty happy with the space. I know we sure are! And I am sure happy to be done with all of the drywall dust...

I will be back with more updates on the family shortly. Hope you are all doing well and enjoying the end of your summers!