Basement Stage 1: Completed

We've been picking away at our basement facelift for a couple of months now, and as of Sunday night we have finally reached a good stopping point for a while. Praise. The. Lord. JT's aching body and my grumpy need for husband quality time have both been suffering.

As a reminder, we installed the wood stove down in the very unfinished basement, and then found ourselves in a situation where the things we should do to help the efficiency of the stove turned into a whole bunch of "well while we're doing that we might as well do this too." To keep things somewhat realistic, we've decided on a moderately long term goal of pseudo-finishing the basement within the next couple years, with the bulk of it probably being done over the course of this year. Stage 1 (meaning, the stuff we're going to do right now) is officially done.

This is what we started with. I wish so much that I had better before pictures, but I tend to get excited and jump right into things without capturing the originals very well. I'm trying to work on that though.

This is a tiny little slice of our whole basement, but it does do its job in showing what the walls looked like and what the ceiling looked like. This was our basement for the last year and a half of us living here; it was a little creepy and very dirty and we never went down there. I shared in the initial basement facelift post and the last basement update post that JT had spent a considerable amount of time DRYLOKing the walls and then spraying Kilz on all the walls and ceiling rafters. He also insulated all of the windows and crawl space entrances. Here is what the basement looked like when that was done.

Just to give you your bearings: the entrance to the basement from the rest of the house is the doorway at the left of the picture, and the outdoor entrance is at the far right. The wood stove is on the other side of the brick fireplace you see in the middle of the room.

This is the part of the basement that we spent this weekend working on. You may notice that the ceiling is lower on the right side of the picture, which is because the book room upstairs has a step down into it. The ceiling is too low in that space to legally finish it, so we decided it would be a nice big storage area for all that junk you see piled up in the middle of the room. Our plan was to line the back wall with shelves, which meant buying a whole bunch of wood.

And then transporting them all downstairs with an incredibly advanced system.

Then JT just spent the first half of the day cutting, and the second half of the day forming the frame. We used these plans (with some adjustments, but I couldn't tell you what those adjustments were because it's all JT at that point).

First he built the vertical supports, then he built up the boxes that would be the shelves' supports.

And then it was just a matter of screwing everything together (again, I say this like it was easy peasy and like I was the one doing it. I did help hold some things, but Charlotte refused to be happy Saturday so it was almost entirely JT).

Beautiful, aren't they? That was Saturday night's stopping point, and Sunday we ripped down the plywood and JT installed it all for the shelves' bases. And then we had the pleasant experience of going through that massive pile of stuff to weed out garbage, make a donate pile, and reorganize in a more logical way. Not to mention that all of it (ALL of it) was coated in paint dust from the sprayer, even though it was under a tarp the whole time. But in the end, this is what we have.

Looks good, doesn't it? The white brightens up the whole room so much, and the shelves are a dream. It's so much better than the pile in the middle of the room. (Don't mind that huge puddle of spilled paint in the middle of the floor. It's always good to make sure your spouse hears you when you ask them to tighten the lid on the 5 gallon bucket of paint.)

And you might notice that the red support poles are now white! It took four coats but thankfully it was a super quick process and they look so much better now! The paint on the floor and around the poles isn't an issue because on our list to get done sometime this year is to paint the whole floor. So no worries there.

We're stoked about the changes that have already happened in the basement, and we're excited about the rest of the changes that will take place over the course of the year (and longer). One thing on the list that is pretty awesome is that we will wall in the storage room and line the rest of the walls with more of the same shelves. Can you even imagine? I'm already dreaming of all the stocking up I can do...I may be able to avoid Costco for six months! ;)

Here's our basement to-do list as it looks right now (long term and short term):

• insulate rafters and paint over them
• paint the red support posts white
• build shelves for storage space and organize everything that's under that huge tarp
• paint the floor (later in the year)
• put walls up to conceal the storage area (maybe by the end of the year/next winter sometime)
• install more shelves in the concealed storage area (end of the year/next winter)
• put in a bathroom (long term plans)
• sheet rock ceiling (long term plans)
• sheet rock and insulation on walls (long term plans)
• install outlets throughout the basement (long term plans)
• furnish the rooms (long term plans)

So we do have a long way to go still, but I'm glad we will be picking away at it over time. There are still those handful of things that we would love to get done at some point this year, but nothing really seems to be an emergency any more and we can leisurely cross them off the list. Fingers crossed, but the next big project for our list is, as of right now, my dining room table and various kitchen accessories! My fingers are crossed REAL hard for this, because I. Can't. Wait. for my table. I left the plastic fold-up table out for weeks after Thanksgiving instead of putting it away because I just loved pretending I had my big farmhouse table already. And it's looking very promising that we should be building it in May!