Basement, part 2

Big huge thanks to my mother-in-law who has agreed to host Thanksgiving this year! Wahoo, we got a reprieve on Project Eat-Off-The-Basement-Floor!

It’s a temporary reprieve… we are still holding our office Christmas party down here next month. So we are still working our butts off to get this thing finished.

Since there were a few parts of the floor that had never been painted, and we were never going to get all the dirt off the floor, we decided to paint the whole dang thing. We moved the freezers away from the wall, scrubbed the entire thing (with a major floor scrubber!), painted where the freezers were supposed to go, and then moved them back.

Cleaning the basement

This is not your run-of-the-mill “we need to sweep the floors and knock down the cobwebs once a year” sort of basement cleaning. This is serious basement cleaning.

One of the drawbacks of doing some of the work for our home remodel ourselves is that, well, the construction guys didn’t do everything. Including the post-construction clean up. And, frankly, we haven’t gotten to the basement yet.

But it is time. (Okay, it’s well past time.)

There are sort of three parts to our basement now. The part under the new house (we’ll deal with that later…), the main part under the old house, and the smaller part under the old house (we put up a wall to separate these two sections).

We’ve been dealing with the smallest part of the basement so far. Here’s half of it… with a bunch of junk.

Remodel Mondays – Framing the addition

Right before Thanksgiving the walls for the new basement were poured and sealed. The floor didn’t get poured until right before Christmas. We were starting to wonder if the new basement was just going to have a dirt floor. Not to worry, it has a beautiful, sealed and shiny concrete floor!

Shortly after Christmas the real excitement began. The back wall of the basement was framed out, complete with big window and sliding glass door to the future patio.

Remodel Mondays – A new basement

The home remodel project is moving so quickly now, I can barely keep up! The first part of the extravaganza was to do some demolition on the outside of the house, so the basement under the new addition could get dug.

This is the east side of our house. This will soon just be the middle of the house. Our dogs love to sleep under the spruce tree on the left of the photo. That was one of the first things to go… They are going to have to find another place to sleep next summer!

The basement is finished!

Well, sort of.

Last we knew, the basement had been flooded,



all the stuff had been taken to the garage,



and the basement had dried out.



We were working on cleaning and scraping the walls of the basement so we could repaint.



I am happy to report that we have finished!

We washed and scraped and washed and scraped and washed again.  Somewhere in there we sprayed everything down with bleach.  We also washed and painted the floor.  And here is what we finally got!

The walls and floor are clean and beautiful.



We built lots of shelves so all the stuff from the garage could be nicely stored in the basement.



Well, it's getting there...

The most important thing is that all the stuff got taken out of the garage, including the two tractors that were hiding in the back!



And now, that garage fits not just one...



Not just two...



But three vehicles!  Including my husband's long bed, extended cab pick up!



Now we're talking!

If only the basement would sort and organize itself...