We have walls! (And dust!)

Hello there!! Hope you had a lovely weekend! I’m so excited to share the progress on our basement with you – the process has gone much faster than we thought, but some parts have taken way longer than we expected.

The drywall happened sooner than we thought it would, only because the guys doing the work gave us a stellar deal on the installation if we went ahead a couple weeks early.

They did this with the framing too, and it’s been worth for us to keep them busy! :)

Thing is, the rest of this finishing process has gone nice and slow, and going ahead with the drywall even a couple weeks early meant we had to do quite a few things first – it was the only time (so far) I’ve been a little stressed about the project.

I had a long list of things that had to be completed before we could cover everything – installing another cable jack, running the gas line for the dryer, installing the insulation just to name a few. We did not insulate the entire basement – just the ceilings (for soundproofing reasons), and the walls in hubby’s office (for more soundproofing reasons – he writes music in that room).  All in all, it took about a week to to get all of that done and get the whole space drywalled.

Then the finishers (who taped, mudded and sanded the drywall) were only supposed to take three days – and that ended up taking seven.

This part of the process has taken the longest by far, but we expected that. We just didn’t expect quite so long. :)

It feels like a REAL, finished space now! Probably because it is a REAL finished space. I’m just not used to it -- we have WALLS people!

We still need to cut the hole for the crawl space:

We are using it for storage (for all the doors I take down around the house). :) They will install a door for access.

Because of pipes, they had to pull one wall out a bit more than the others in a corner. They were putting a small access door in there anyway, because our water shut off is inside. And when I looked back there, I saw S.T.O.R.A.G.E.

So I had them cut a spot for another door:

It’s a smaller door because there is electrical stuff running underneath it – if I had thought of this sooner they would have run it accordingly and made it an actual closet. The guys love me. ;)

It’s only about a foot deep, but it’s a good four feet back – tons of storage space! (I can reach almost all the way back.) WHOO!

You know how I am about that storage. Swoon.

Speaking of, here’s the space under the stairs:

The tall door is in the hallway, the small door (still big enough for me to get through) is in hubby’s office. I LOVE THEM. :)

Someday…long from now, when I don’t have LOADS of Christmas decor, we figure we’ll turn it into a wine closet. Oh la la!

Now the basement is so unbelievably bright and cheery, even with unfinished walls!:

(The Bub has been without most of his toys for two weeks – he is a rock star. He wasted no time getting some out tonight!)

The light bulbs hanging are temporary – tomorrow I hope to install the “can” part of the recessed lights and get the real bulbs in there. So excited about the little things!

The contractors doing our work have been incredible, especially because they’ve had to work around all of our STUFF down there. We decided not to move it all out and today after the finishers left, I regretted that for about ten minutes. The layer of dust was a bit overwhelming. :)

But it took no time at all to get things cleaned up, I was quite surprised:

It still needs a good deep cleaning, but I’ll wait till the flooring is done to tackle that.

It felt so good to get down to the basement again -- we didn’t realize how very much we use this space until we were without it for two weeks. I was quite happy to spend the evening down there, cleaning and rearranging and puttering around.

I love basements. :)

So far we’re more than on track with the timeline -- initially we thought it would take about six months, and then we thought maybe five. Obviously we’re taking our time – we’re paying as we go.

Now we think we’ll be done with the biggies in four months total. We started in February and I think we’ll be done in May – but that doesn’t include the toilet, sink, light fixtures or tile floors. Those will come over the summer.

The next steps are priming (the guys will prime the entire basement this week), then painting (I’m going to paint the family room, but will wait on the other spaces) – and that’s going to take me awhile. Then the flooring! I’ll need your thoughts on that soon – we know what type of flooring we’re going with, now I just need to figure out the color. ;)

After that goes in, the guys will come back to do the trim/doors, but I’ll probably do the baseboards myself.

So there you go – some progress you can really see! Here’s how the family room looked at Christmas:

And now (we went back to the original layout we’ve always had):

I tell you what. I do not miss those cement walls!!

SO STINKING EXCITING!

Can’t wait to show it to you all painted! Now I just need to figure out what color I’m using…I still don’t have a CLUE. Light and airy? Sexy and dark? I’m leaning toward light…even though it is like the surface of the sun with all the lights on. ;)