Basement Renovation

For those of you who don't know -- last summer we moved in to a much larger -- foreclosed home. It's actually in pretty good shape -- but immediately I knew the basement was going to need a major redo-- and since we LOVE home projects I started planning immediately. OK, we do LOVE home projects, but we are horrible at completing them. 

For a while now I have slowly been making progress on our basement. I thought I would start sharing about what we are doing -- maybe that will keep me accountable to keep working. 

Here goes -- this is what we started with -- a pretty blank slate -- The door to the left leads in to a little closet that has no light.

Here is the view from the other side. This room is mostly underground -- the door to the left of this picture below leads to the garage -- the house is built in to a hill.

My plan initially was to put in some type of wood floor and then we thought we could move a wall and create a new bedroom/guest room down here. The wood floor went out with the thought of cost and after we heard the basement may have flooded at one point -- that's all we need is for new floor to be ruined. So I decided to tear out all of the old lanolium tiles and figure it out from there. The plan now is to paint the floor. I'm hoping to do that in March.
Here is some of the progress tearing out the flooring from a couple of months ago. Thanks Erin Cornell for the tool to tear it all out. By the way, that's not a motor on the tool it's my work gloves.

 A few other small projects and our need for a new garage door put this all on hold for a while -- but today I was back at it -- demolition time!!
Out comes the wall between the main room and the small closet.

This wall is not a load bearing wall so we are going to move the wall. The two main walls you see here are concrete walls that we are going to build out a little because they have these huge screws protruding out of them.

I have done most of this to this point myself because Nate has been working on what I call his mid-life crisis -- HA -- maybe I'll post about that sometime.
Anyway, he came home after I got all the drywall out and then he decided to get to work -- we moved the storage shelves out of the closet area and then he tested his strength.

Down goes the wall!!! Again, it's not a load bearing wall so it's OK that it's gone. Those studs will likely be put against the back wall or we may just swing it around and make it the new dividing wall between the guest room and the laundry/mud room that will eventually be here.

What's next? Cleaning out the room -- it's been a catch all for junk since we moved -- we have to haul off all the dry wall and I have a little tile to remove from under the washer and dryer. Then I have to get the floor really clean, etch it at least two times, test it for moisture and then paint it.

The floor is not in the greatest shape, but with a little concrete filler it should be OK. The floor is the main project -- I'm planning a few days off in March or April with the goal of getting it done.

This is also our storm shelter area so whatever goes in this room eventually will also have to keep us cozy when we are waiting out the storms.