The Basement Overhaul: Chapter 2

The last time I blogged about the basement was two years and eight months ago. In that post I showed you the basement all torn up, and in this post about the laundry room, I showed you a sneak peek of the bathroom framing. Then I said something really funny:

"I’ll keep updating you as we make progress."

Again, that was almost three years ago. :-) We got to the point where we hated (and I do mean HATED) working on the basement. We were arguing every time we worked on it, overwhelmed by the amount of projects and work that needed to be done, and just plain old sick and tired of working down in the cement dungeon. When we bought our house we vowed to never let it become the priority in our lives, or dictate our actions. So we called a timeout and agreed to shelf the basement project until we could stand to talk about it again.

Tempers cooled, time went by, and we revisited the idea of finishing the basement. At that point we had torn out all of the existing finished parts of the basement, with the exception of the kitchen. It no longer looked like this, thank the Lord.



We agreed at that point that we needed to save up the funds to have the pros come in and finish framing and drywalling for us. In our estimation, if we tried to do it ourselves, it would take us approximately 5,837 years.

So for the next year or so, we saved our pennies. We agreed on the amount of money we would spend on "outsourcing" and shopped around for a contractor that came well recommended and was within our price range. We found a great guy, talked over the plans with him a million times, and finally had him start work in July.

I'm going to take a few posts to show the amount of work Pat and his guys accomplished in just three weeks. It was nothing short of amazing. But before that, here's where things stood before they got to work.

The stairwell down, clad in paneling



The stairs themselves, freaky and creaky



The view directly across from the bottom of the stairs

To the right



The laundry area



The bathroom



To the left of the stairs



And what we're calling the "nook"



Although it looks pretty scary, we had actually accomplished a lot at this point:

• Demolition, and LOTS of it.


• Supports for the stairs


• Framing for the bathroom


• Reworking of some ductwork, and adding a duct for the bath/living areas


• Electrical to the laundry and bathroom areas (with the exception of the shower)


• Plumbing for the laundry and bathroom, including building a platform and installing a pump for the shower


• Installing a new toilet and sink/faucet


• Replacing the water heater


• Having our window guy replace the other two glass block windows


• Cable guy ran new internet connection


• Removed all of the nasty vinyl tile stuck to the cement floor.

That's where things stood when the contractors began. Next up, drylok and framing!