DIY :Our basement

Bless my dear, sweet, good looking husband John. Saturday I asked him to find some stuff for me that was in storage. Our current storage set up is just a huge mountain of plastic totes sitting in the corner of the basement. Every time I/we want something, it's ALWAYS on the bottom. So John said, "you know, I think I'll build some storage shelves down there." I heard "honey, let's remodel the basement." I was so happy and excited. I immediately had a list of 10 things I wanted done. Then I got more ideas! Then even more! Woot! How fun. John said "wow. This is a lot of work just to get some shelves."

Our basement is two HUGE rooms. One is John's office/our basement gym. The other is largely unused. The washer and dryer sit at one end. Our junk sits in the other corner. The furnace is in there. We don't have a furnace room/closet because until we moved here, this house did not have central heat/air. The ceiling is a drop ceiling which was partially torn down to put in the duct work. We/John were going to fix that ceiling right up when we moved in. And now, it's 2 years later. We never really go down into the basement (except John, for work) so I guess it just isn't a priority. The walls are covered in dark paneling. There's a big sliding glass door, but it's still like a cave in there.

John said shelves. But first:

1. replace old toilet in the creepy bathroom down there. We had our master bathroom redone before we moved in. We kept that toilet. First it sat in the garage for a year, then the basement. On Sunday, after 2 trips to the hardware store, a day with the water to the house turned off after John broke the pipe, and several hours of John's hard labor, we have a working toilet! Woot!

2. Clean out all the junk. John's working on this now. Well, not now. Now he's at work.

3. Repair ceiling, repair/replace missing molding/trim from paneling. Get a new door for the crawl space (currently shut off by a huge piece of ply wood on the bottom, and a baby gate across the top). Remove strange 1970's attached to the wall space heater thingy. Clean the floor and walls.

4. prime and paint! woot! something I can't wait to do. I love painting! The walls will go from a dull dark brown to an off white color. We're painting everything. Walls, trim, doors.

5. repair the floor. There's at least one small crack and a couple holes in the floor where a creepy partition was nailed down. Seal the floor with water proofing stuff (or the paint won't stick as well). Paint. Woot! I think it will be tan or light brown.

6. Build shelves! John will either be really happy at this point or be ready to kill himself. Install shelves. Paint shelves to match walls (I want them to have a built in look).

We've given ourselves a month to do this. I suspect it will take longer, but that's okay. At least we'll be able to find our junk without having to dig through all the boxes.

Last night, John reminded me that this was a lot of work just to get some shelves. I told him that raising two kids was a lot of work just so that he'd have someone to give his stuff too when he died. He agreed and went to the basement to work some more:).

Pics to come. I have before pics on the camera, but need to download them. Hopefully we'll at least be priming by Sunday so I'll get pics of that too.

Stay tuned:).