Big progress on our basement remodel

Did you know that my second most viewed post was the tour of our new house (236 views)?  Second only to my post that we were expecting Abby (248 views).  Newborn pictures and other house updates follow pretty closely behind and my late summer garden roundup post wasn't far behind.  Anyways, what that tells me is that ya'll enjoy following along as we update the house and make it our own.  This winter (well, we started in late November of 2013) we tackled one of the largest projects we have planned; the basement. 

We've made TONS of progress and I've been holding out on you all with the update posts because for a long, long, long time it didn't really LOOK like anything was happening.  Studs seem to go up pretty quick but after that there's a  lot of little behind the scenes work that happens that doesn't look like much.  Like electric, trenching up the pipes to install a bathroom, insulation, framing out duct work, installing a second electric box, moving support posts and a whole host of small tasks that I probably don't even remember right now. 

The before pictures are hard to match up to the afters since we reworked a bunch of walls and the layout is pretty different, but here goes nothing!! For a reference, in the top middle of the picture you'll see the landing for the steps that come down in the middle of the room.  In the before pictures you could turn either left (pictured here, imagine standing on those steps in the top middle) or to the right and your view would be the next picture.  In the afters' we closed off the wall to the right to make a bedroom, meaning you can only come down the stairs and go left.  Phew!  Lost yet?  I hope not!

This view is now closed off, but you'll recognize the closet on the left and the water heater area in the back in the after pictures.  The white wall to the right was opened up and now includes the entrance to the laundry room and bathroom.

This old office area was reconfigured into the bathroom and laundry rooms.

And this huge storage area is now our office.  I was REALLY sad to lose this space, but I think it was worth you.  You decide for yourself!  Here are the afters!

*Well, hold on.  A few things before we get to the good stuff.  Though many of the areas are pretty much finished, anyone that has ever worked on a remodel will tell you that there is a huge difference between done, and DONE done.  I'm ready to start sharing some of our progress with you (it's been killing me!) but, we've still got a lot to do before we call this project DONE done.  I'll be pointing out those as we go along. 

*Also, excuse the blurry pictures.  Something was up with my camera and the lighting when I took them and I was too tired to redo them all once I noticed.

Here's the new view when you come down the stairs (you can see them to the far left).  The tile area with the saw on it will be our bar (TBD - to be built).  The futon in the back won't be living there for long and to the left of the futon will be a wood burning stove.  Like most basements it's cool downstairs and we're hoping to supplement our propane heat with this wood burning stove through the winter months.  You can see our new TV built into the wall and the speakers next to and above it.  They will be covered eventually and painted to disappear in the wall.  The TV will get framed out with trim to finish it off.  

Here's a better shot of the bar area and to the far right you can just make out the door to the outside.  The small unfinished area in the back corner is one of our sump pumps.  That area will be covered with a door and house some of our beer glasses/bar stuff.  The tile in the bar area and under the wood burning stove are the wood grain tiles.  They look great in real life!  I can't wait to clean them up and show them off.

Well, I guess you can see the wood grain tiles a little better in this shot.  This is taken from the far back corner with my back against the door to the outside.  The red posts will eventually get boxed out to more substantial squares and painted white.  There used to be another post to the far right and we moved the one you can see back about 2 feet.  We'd originally hoped to remove both posts completely but our architect said the cost to remove it was astronomically high so we compromised by moving it back a bit and just taking the one out.   Just past the post you can barely catch a glimpse of our new office space.  We'll get to that in a minute 

*A "pre-carpet" picture but I wanted to toss it in so you could see the last minute addition we made the night before the carpet came.  We had to leave our mark for whoever comes after us :O)

Don't you love my beautiful styling before I took these pictures.  You know, nothing like a dusty counter, a mash-up of random junk, a lone Miller Lite can and the tips of an antler mount behind the far chair to say "welcome to our basement tour!".

Aside from the mess, this is our office space.  Ryan's desk area is in the back and mine is right there in the front.  There's some great storage along the wall.  This space is going to be very well used.  Ryan was so sweet to give me a space in the office for my quilting.  We installed the higher counters along the wall for cutting fabric and eventually Ryan is going to modify my desk area so my sewing machine will sit level in the counter, making sewing larger projects a lot easier.  There will be tons of other customization in this room going forward but I'll save the rest for another post. 

Just the right of Ryan's desk sits this small closet.  When the door is closed this pile of wires is completely hidden.  This small closet holds all of the stuff to run the TV/stereo/DVD etc.  It's all done using a wireless signal from the living room into the closet and it is probably one of the coolest things we did in the basement.  Ryan's really proud of this pile of wires.  Don't worry, we'll be rearranging in here and making the space more usable....but you guys don't really care about that.

The door to the office sits just to the right in this picture, and this little pink nook is the bottom of the stairs that come down into the middle of the room.  I just realized I didn't get a single picture of the wall to the left here (with the toys against it).  Eventually that wall will house a custom built-in bookcase to hold toys/DVD's and books.  The little pink area is a special hidey hole space for Abby.  Our thought is that the built-in bookcase will extend around this corner and house a secret door to get into this small play place.  You can see that we even included a light at kid height in there.  We'll see how that spot evolves.  We've not ironed it all out just yet.  Just past Abby's pink hideout you see the door that goes into our new guest bedroom.  The door all the way at the end of the hallway goes to our utility room and the bathroom/laundry sit on the right side of the hallway.

A quick backwards glance into Abby's hiding spot.  It's tiny, but so is she!

Onto the guest room.  You'll recognize the closet I pointed out from the before pictures.  This room is a little bit longer than it is wide but we wanted to put the guest room in here because it had the second set of windows.  Since we've got a walkout basement, these windows look out at ground level which is really nice for a basement bedroom.  You can see we kept the old wall of paneling but painted it white to hide the ugly :O) It will eventually be capped with a nice finished piece of dark wood to finish it off.

This pic is of the guest room pretty much standing in that closet in the corner.  The large dresser in the top right is covering the new wall we added.  Remember, just past this wall is the staircase, and you used to be able to walk into this area from right behind that dresser.

Just outside the door to the bedroom and across the hall you enter into our new bathroom.  Remember, the basement wasn't plumbed for a bathroom and laundry so this all had to be dug out to run the plumbing.  Of course we still need to figure out a mirror and clean up the junk in the corner, but this bathroom and the laundry room are the closest to "done' in the whole basement.  

Just past the pile of junk and to the left is the shower.  It's nothing special, just a walk-in surround but it's new, white, and beautiful.  Ryan even showered down there once to try it out.  As you back out of the bathroom and keep heading down the hallway, you'll hit the laundry room.

The very last room at the end of hall is the laundry room.  When we first moved into the house the dryer was located in the garage (that the old owners were strangely converting to a living room addition.  Why in the world you'd choose to loose your garage to a living room instead of finishing the basement is a mystery to me....but I'm not here to judge).  The washer was located in the entry off the garage that we changed into a mudroom soon after moving in.  Anyways, back to the laundry room.  It's noting too crazy, but it's pretty big.  We plan to hang a few clothes lines in the room to air dry clothes in the winter and I'll be using the large blank wall to the right for quilting (more on that later). 

Inside the room and looking towards the washer you can see we added a utility sink (great for cleaning paint brushes and crafting).  We added a few cabinets for storage of cleaning supplies and other things just to round out the room.

This room is painted a pretty yellow color (Ryan hates it....but I can count on one hand the number of times he's done laundry so I won this battle).  Oh, and my seeds.  It's nearly time to start seeding the cool weather stuff like lettuce, spinach and beans so I had to get those little guys started ASAP. 

Phew!   Are you sick of the tour yet?? Don't worry, this is the final space.  This unfinished area lies all the way at the end of the hallway.  When I lost the huge storage area in the remodel (scroll up to the before pictures if you forgot), we had to get creative.  We added wire shelving back here at the end of the hallway(behind the furnace and water heater - you can just barely see them on the right hand side of this picture) and are storing all of our holiday decorations and camping supplies back here.  Ignore the dusk ON EVERY SURFACE!!  I've been fighting it for months and I think we are FINALLY past it now that the carpet is down.  Thank the lord on high!

Ok, so that's the update on the basement remodel.  We've got a TON done but we've still got a ways to go.  Now that spring is here we're likely turning our attention to outside projects for awhile but we plan to tick away at the smaller things we've got left when we have time.  I'm exhausted just typing it all up!

Stick around, after taking all these pictures I decided to shoot a little video of it to give you a better idea of who it all flows together.  I'll be posting it for you in a day or so.