Basement Update

Last time I showed you pictures of the basement mini-reno, JT had just finished painting the walls but everything was still a mess down there. Since then, he has spent an incredible amount of time insulating the ends of the rafters, sealing a few more drafts we discovered (seriously...how can there be so many drafts?), painting over all the new insulation, and cleaning everything up. And now the pictures are much more dramatic.

Just as a reminder, here is a (kind of bad) picture of what we started with:

And this is what we had last time:

And this is what we have now:

Looks pretty good, right? JT has killed himself (almost but not quite literally) on this basement so far, and I think we're both pretty stoked the light at the end of the tunnel is getting closer. Just for giggles, here are some close ups of the insulation JT installed to try to help with drafts.

Do you see the space in between each rafter, and how there is now insulation filling each space? It's hard to see because he also painted over each piece to make it less noticeable. Honestly, guys, we have a lot of rafters and that's a lot of spaces to fill. He cut each piece of insulation separately to size, stapled them all in place, and then painted them all. All the way around the whole  basement. He also covered both crawl space holes with fresh insulation and all three mini windows with insulation and painted over all of them as well.

 That's one of the crawl space holes filled in.

It all looks so good and clean! And not even slightly creepy like it was originally. You may notice that there's paint on the floor from when he sprayed the walls, but that's okay because painting the floor is in the middle-long term plan. Next up on the list is building a massive amount of shelves for the storage area and going through/organizing that massive pile of stuff that's sitting in the middle of the room. I'm not necessarily looking forward to that process, but I'm SUPER excited for the finished product.

Here's the basement progress so far:

• insulate rafters and paint over them
• 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)
• (maybe) 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)

It still looks like a lot on that list, but they should all be relatively quick and easy (famous. last. words.). Unless this predicted snow gets in the way, wood should be purchased for the shelves this weekend and we will knock those out before JT starts his class in March and becomes, in his words, "useless" for a while.