How’s the Basement?

Since starting the basement at the end of January, this is a question we often get asked. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately??) our answer throughout the summer has been – not much!  At the beginning of the summer we decided that it would be okay to take a break and enjoy our summer.  Summer in Minnesota is short, and we didn’t want to look back and remember this as “the summer that was the basement”. 

Remember where we started? 



Okay, so technically we started here:



If I’m really honest, the photo above shows an improvement from the true “low” of the basement.  While there is junk everywhere, over the years it has been worse - I just knew better than to take pictures of it!

So, what did we accomplish on the basement this summer?  Or at least since I last wrote about the basement?  Honestly, not too much.  We did some painting – the ceilings are now all done.  The closets are all painted.  The bedroom is painted.  The windows are painted (white!).  All that is left to paint is the bathroom (not sure what color yet) and the patio door.  Until we have cabinets built anyways.  Then we start painting again…

We painted the windows a few weeks ago after we realized they would need painted when the weather was nice so that we could leave them open to dry.  Luckily, we had a September weekend with beautiful weather, and unluckily, we spent the majority of that Sunday painting windows.  Initially we had high hopes that we would be able to paint both windows and the patio door all in one day.  It didn’t take more than a few minutes of priming to figure out that this was going to take significantly longer than we anticipated it to, and we needed to change gears.  The patio door does not need to be left open during the painting process, so it had to wait.  It took two coats of paint after priming, with a light sanding in between each coat.  The windows do feel pretty good!

Now our basement looks like this: 
(Note: Look for the photo bombers in each of the Rec Room pictures!)



Now that the painting is done in the bedroom, 2 more doors have been taken from this stack and installed this week!!  More progress!!



You can really see the difference between the windows painted white and the patio door that is not yet painted.  The trim is obviously not in yet, but that will help to frame out the windows too.  The outside two window panes open, so there are gray framed screens in each of those two windows.  We initially thought they looked terrible when we put them back in, but until I saw these photos, I had started to think that they looked okay.  Now I’m not so sure…






Here is a photo of the bedroom too – documenting that there really has been some progress in there too:



See?  Ceiling and walls are painted and the outlets have been installed. 

There has at least been SOME progress in the basement this summer, just not much.

For the record, the tools spread all over are proof that work actually happens down there!