Behold Our Progress!

Seeing as how it's been over a month since my last update, I figured it was high time to let the masses know how things are going. Believe it or not, we have been diligently working in the basement this whole time and things are looking quite different downstairs.

First things first: we got our permits! Woo hoo! We really wanted to this be legal finished square footage to add value to our home and also to avoid any potential issues should we ever sell.

So when I last left off, we had just had the gas meter moved outside. David and I took a few days off work that week, and spent pretty much every minute of it framing away.

I am so excited about our fireplace alcove. It's going to be completely tiled, and I am toying with the idea of painting the fireplace white with high heat paint.

Here you can see our oh-so-classy built in bookshelves. Those shelves are hand-made by David, by the way.

After doing a bit of research, David decided it would be wise to use a waterproofing paint on the concrete floor to help protect our future flooring from moisture.

We used Drylok and so far, so good. It has really cut down on the "basement smell" which is A-ok with me.

There's one coat on the left and the recommended two coats on the right. Not only is it helping to keep our basement dry, it also makes it look waaaaay cleaner in the mean time.

One thing we realized when researching building codes is that the egress window in the bedroom was 1/4" too high. Instead of moving the window lower, which would have been way expensive, we opted to raise the floor by screwing down 3/4" treated plywood. Each one of these bad boys weighed over 100 pounds, so after lugging 6 of them downstairs, David and I were both super sore the next day.

So here's how things are looking right now. Very messy.

We are still working on finishing the framing on the other side of the basement. I added in the walls that we still have to go so you get an idea of how things are going to look.

The laundry room is towards the front and the future bathroom is at the back.

This is area we are working on right now. This is the future home of our bath tub. It is tricky because not only is it under the stairs (oh, the angles!!) but the framing has to be extremely precise to make sure the tub fits just right. We also will be building a platform for the tub to sit on to make room for the drain lines underneath. We are going to make the wall behind the tub (that's shared with the den) double thick to cut down on noise transfer from the shower (two layers of insulation) and also to accommodate the header that runs right there.

So what else do we have to do?

• Finish framing walls
• Rough in bathroom plumbing, get inspected (we just hired a plumber for this)
• Run electrical, get inspected.
• Replace windows (we are going to take a stab at DIY-ing this, eek!)
• Drywall, drywall, then drywall some more
• Paint, paint, then paint some more
• Floor and ceiling
• Final inspections!
• Trim and finishing things like doors, closet, stairs, etc.

Our goal is to have this all finished by the end of the year, and I cannot wait to be able to relax in our new finished basement!