A Basement Facelift

Some of you that are homeowners are aware of the phenomenon that is the snowball effect: you fix and/or add one thing and decide "well since we're doing this we might as well cross this thing off the list too, and if we're going to do those things we really should get this done first, and then we might as well do this too..." and suddenly you're chin-deep in a project and the only way out is to just get it done (and spend much more money than you ever anticipated for that initial tiny addition). Friends, welcome to our basement.

As far as unfinished basements go, it's quite large. 1,800 square feet, in fact. It's really handy because all the junk we didn't feel like going through and cleaning out when we moved could just be tossed down there and not really dealt with because I wasn't having to find homes for it. We always knew we would build shelves to store all that junk, and we always imagined finishing it in the faaaar off future. It just wasn't a priority because it didn't need to be, and honestly we had more than enough keeping us busy upstairs. But then we installed a wood burning stove in the basement to supplement the heat pump and help offset some cost. When we had the first couple truly frigid days we realized how much air was coming into the basement through various drafts and cracks (and therefore fighting the work of the stove), so we sealed them all up. (Who am I kidding? We didn't do anything. JT did 99% of everything that has been done so far.) When we realized that a ton of moisture was coming in through the bare cinder blocks, though, it was time to do the horrible task of DRYLOKing all those walls. This stuff is super expensive and super thick. It goes on like mud, it must be hand-applied because it's too thick to be sprayed, and the bare cinder block sucks it up like a sponge so good luck doing anything less than two coats. JT spent a lot of time doing this. A LOT. I helped one afternoon when Charlotte actually napped for a significant chunk of time but other than that JT was down there all by himself.

I don't have much in the ways of a "before" picture (typical) but I do have this:

Here you can see the wood stove, the metal rack we've been storing wood on, and most importantly the bare cinder blocks. Here are some shots of the progress with the DRYLOK:

It's not much, I know, but you can see that the walls are white and that it's a pretty dramatic difference. I knew that even though we were doing this for a very practical reason, painting the walls white would also really lighten up the whole basement. I was excited for the dingy, dark, and moderately scary basement to be freshened and cleaned up a little bit. The next part of the snowball effect helped take that whole concept to a new level: JT was looking up at the basement ceiling one day and mentioned that those beams are 40 years old, and have 40 years of who knows what all over them and growing on them. He suggested we borrow a friend's sprayer and paint the ceiling with Kilz to go ahead and just kill whatever funk is on it. Since the cinder blocks had kind of sucked up the second coat of the DRYLOK as well and there was no way we were paying for enough paint for a third coat just so it would look good, we decided to actually spray the walls and ceiling with Kilz to even things out visually as well as just make sure we were cleaning everything up. 

This kind of killed me, I'm not going to lie. I love those rafters and beams; they're cedar, for crying out loud. Who builds houses with cedar? People in the 1970s, I suppose. They were so pretty and cool, but they were also kind of funky and I knew they would look good white too. So, JT once again got back to work and sprayed everything. And here's the current state of our basement:

I know it's still not all that pretty, but it looks great compared to what it did. And we also know what's to come, which means that having it painted is such a great first step (that was like a month in the making). Speaking of what's to come...we originally hadn't planned on even touching this basement for many many years, and then we decided to jump head first into it and just do it all, and we've now settled on kind of a happy medium. Here's what's to come for our basement, with a rough schedule:

• paint the red support posts white (soon)
• build shelves for storage space and organize everything that's under that huge tarp (soon)
• paint the floor (later in the year)
• move the treadmill downstairs (later in the year)
• put walls up to conceal the storage area (maybe by the end of the year/next winter sometime)

So that's the loose plan. We had originally thought we'd just cruise right to area rugs and furniture and a television, making it just a couple of simple steps away from being finished. But since our only child is 4 months old and isn't in desperate need of a teenage hangout just yet, and since the upstairs of our house is 100% more than enough for us to live in, and since there are about a hundred other things we'd rather get started on in the house, we're tabling that thought for now. The shelves and the floor are still big ones, and we plan to do them this year but if not it certainly won't be a big deal. This has been an incredible amount of time and money invested to make it look like this, and even though it might not be too impressive in pictures we're more than pleased with the difference it makes. (And so does our wood stove, who doesn't have to work nearly as hard anymore.)