Adventures in Domesticity

The Basement Chronicles, Part the Sixth

In Which We Spend Far Too Many Weekends Hanging Drywall Piece by Piece.

I've been a neglectful blogger lately - it's been almost a month.  The lag in posting has a lot to do with starting on the drywall in the basement, Brian and Chrissy's return to Minnesota, discovering I like to knit, snow, and the impending Christmas season.  We honestly haven't done much worth writing about.

The significant thing that we have managed to do in the last month is drywalling the basement ceiling and have gotten a full corner section of wall done.  (Credit where credit is due - Dan and Brian helped out a lot.)  I think our building permit expires at the end of the year - we're not going to make it.  We should only be a month or so late, I think (read: desperately hope).  Then we can start on the fun of painting and flooring and making this an actual ROOM.

I was just looking over the last post I made about the basement, and got a little nostalgic at how nice it looked all tidy and clean.  Drywall has destroyed that, leaving a layer of chalky gypsum dust all over everything.  My eyes have been simultaneously dry and weepy for weeks. There are tools strewn all over the place.  The trash has not been taken out.  We are renovation slobs.  See?

I've been enjoying the work overall, but I think I'm ready for the heavy stuff to be done.  Bring on the girly projects, please!  Craig was making fun of me a couple of weeks ago - we did a bunch of drywall work in the afternoon, and then I sat down and sewed a case for my knitting needles.  If you need me, I'll just be preening my Renaissance Woman badge.

The Basement Chronicles, Part the Fifth

Hey, remember way back when we were renovating our basement?  Turns out we still are.

Over the summer and the first part of fall, we took a break from the really intensive work and concentrated on things like gardening and grilling and going on vacation.  We worked in the basement every now and then, though, and got the insulation done.  We passed the insulation inspection this week, and are ready to start hanging drywall.  It looks more like a room now than ever!

We have R-13 insulation in the walls, and R-28 in the ceiling, primarily for sound-deadening purposes.  The wood floors on the main floor don't provide much in the way of a barrier.  You can also see our makeshift setup for a flat screen HDTV that we don't yet own.  All the cables go through the wall - there will be some sort of bookshelf or console to hold the TiVo, DVD player, and whatnot down below, and then the television will be mounted on the wall, with no cords in sight.  Sweet!

Looking the other direction, into the dining and office area.

Even though not a lot of work has been done, the bathroom gets a shot for good measure.

And to refresh your memory (and mine), links to The Compleat Basement Chronicles:

Part the First

Part the Second

Part the Third

Part the Fourth

Needed: One Bearskin Rug

Our fireplace is in and working!  Just in time for summer, natch.

It's got a fun remote control, so we will not be burdened with the need to get off the couch to warm our feet.  Ahhh.

Break Time

We've gotten to a good stopping point in the basement - the framing is done, the electrical is done, and we've passed our rough-in inspections for both. Let me say that again - we passed both our inspections.  Woo!  There are a few things that we need to attend to, but neither inspector said "You know, you really need to tear everything out and start from scratch.  Because you clearly suck."  I am paranoid, and I was afraid of this.

Next up is insulation, but we're going to take a bit of a break, get our Menards bills in order, not fight about framing, and concentrate on other things for at least the month of May.  Other things include gardening, the Friends School Plant Sale, the Minnesota Scottish Fair and Highland Games, the return of creative cooking via our CSA box, some more sewing, and generally enjoying spring.

Here's a look at what the basement looks like now.  (And a testament to the fact that people with minimal HTML skills can figure out how to do anything after some Google searching.  Okay, almost anything, as the slideshow doesn't really fit.  But you can see the larger slideshow here if you want to.  It's still better than posting a string of 10 shots of two by fours.)

Our Secret Shame

We've only been hit with one truly hideous room in our house.  Sure, the main areas of the basement weren't great and the living room (and the entire exterior) was painted baby poop brown.  But the only place that makes me throw up my hands and turn around is the basement bathroom.

This gem features three walls at strange angles, and no fourth wall.  When we moved in, the fourth wall was curtains that hid the space under the stairs and the back of some paneling in another room.  The previous owners took the curtains with them.  The flooring is beige peel and stick tiles, accompanied by glossy black peel and stick baseboard.  The vanity is a pressboard affair with a beige top, featuring a built-in seashell-shaped soap dish.  There's a robin's egg blue shower stall with a light in it, and the paint color on the walls has been meticulously matched.

The bathroom is also home to the air compressor at the moment.  And the lightbulbs have been replaced, although it only adds to the charm.

This is looking into the bathroom from the doorway to the family room area.  The vanity is immediately to the left.  There will be a storage area under the stairs.  This won't make the room any less of a weird shape, but it will at least qualify as a fourth wall.

At first, we were going to simply leave the bathroom alone, and maybe put up a coat of paint.  The more time I spend around the room, though, the more it bugs me.  So I've taken over.  And because I'm me, I have a Plan:

1. Finish off the DriCore throughout the bathroom floor.  The step down into the bathroom from the hallway is just too weird.  I've already ripped out the crappy faux baseboard, and I plan to use the leftover scraps of DriCore to finish off the bathroom floor.  It won't take a lot, but there will be lots of measuring and trimming involved.  Since these are scraps, the tongue-and-groove functions won't work.  I see construction adhesive in my future...
2. Give the walls a coat of fresh white paint.  This will be necessary as we blend in with the new drywall in the areas just being finished.
3. Find new hardware for the vanity, and probably give it a coat of white paint as well.  The top and the seashell will just have to stay for the time being.  If I can find a nice looking faucet that's fairly inexpensive, that one is definitely going away.
4. Work with what I can't change cheaply.  Namely, the robin's egg blue shower stall.  Luckily, this color of blue is pretty trendy lately.  (Just look at Martha Stewart's background!)  I'm planning on using some FLOR carpet tiles in blue and brown, with coordinating fabrics for a curtain and towel edging.   This just means we need to finish things up before this goes out of style.

I'm pretty excited about all of this, especially the carpet tiles.  It's not often that I can work up the courage to be funky and stylish. 

First things first, though - I'm going to have to move the air compressor.

The Basement Chronicles, Part the Fourth

Our weekends have quieted down a little bit, so it's back to the basement for us.  We finished the framing a few weeks ago, and have moved on to the electrical work.  After a snow-related delay, the fireplace guys came by for the first stage of installation.  It's almost like we have a room...

Storage area.

We'll have a window-type opening between the stairwell and the basement room.  Once we tore down the wall that was here, we really liked the extra light that it brought downstairs.  We've got an old TV downstairs to make the work go a little faster.  NCAA basketball makes electrical work just that much more interesting.

This will be the computer/office nook.  Some sort of storage for Craig's baseball cards will also go here.  I don't know what we'll do for a desk, but I know I want a green-shaded banker's lamp here. 

Here's the doorway into the laundry room.  We're still considering what to do with the Lally pole that's halfway in the wall and halfway outside of it, and right at the end of the stairs.  I'm thinking that we might be able to use half of a pole cover and make it into some sort of column feature.  We can't box it in with drywall without obstructing the stairs a little too much.  (This didn't stop the previous owners.)

Here's the fireplace as it is today.  We have to do the electrical connection and put some drywall on the upper half of the wall, and then the installers will come back to attatch the top half of the mantle.  We can also wait to have them do that until we've got all the mudding and taping done, so we don't have to worry about messing up the wood.  I don't know how long I can wait, though...

Here's the upper half of the mantle.  We're responsible for staining the wood.  I know that I want white woodwork and doors down here, but it seems a shame to paint a really nice surface like this.  A nice light stain would probably look all right with the white trim, though.  I think.  At least I have plenty of time to obsess over this.  (Bonus in this picture - nascent electrical work!  We're still figuring out how to measure accurately and minimize the excess cable.)

I Found It In My Basement

All the basement renovations I've been involved with have involved random found items.  Nothing terribly classy, like the cool block prints that House in Progress found, mind you.  In fact, my parents' contractor found a half-full beer can, old Playboys, and Polaroids of the previous owners' son and friends smoking cigarettes and joints simultaneously.  We found our share of gross stuff that went directly into the dumpster, too.  The house had a laundry chute that opened on the top, but was completely closed off on the bottom.  That didn't stop someone from dropping dirty towels down there, though.  At least there weren't any carcasses.

We did find something of interest, though - vintage hunting prints.  Some are 1958 and 1959 calendar prints, while some are full size.  (There's also an "America - Our Heritage" calendar, which inexplicably features the Nebraska state capitol building amidst shots of Mt. Rainier and other natural treasures.) 

The hunting calendar prints are by an artist named Richard E. Bishop, who apparently focused on etchings and prints of birds and waterfowl.  They aren't really our style, nor are the full size poster prints, but I'm hoping that someone out in eBay World might have an affinity for this sort of thing.  If all else fails, I suppose we can always put them back in the vents they came from...

It makes me wonder about the people who put the prints into the vents, though.  Did they do it as a sort of time capsule, so that the person ripping down their ceiling tiles would know that they had some connection with the Indian River Citrus Bank of Vero Beach, Florida, in 1959 and liked black labs?  Or is there some other reason for permanently enclosing posters in vents?

My apologies for the poor picture quality.  The living room seems to lend itself to either very dark pictures, or washed-out flash pictures.  All these should be clickable for detail, though.  You can also see some of my collection of Big Books holding down the curled-up edges of the posters.

The Basement Chronicles, Part the Third

Subtitle: Tell Me About It, Stud

As promised, here are a few pictures of last weekend's basement framing project.  Craig and I got a bit more done today on our own.  By the end of Sunday, we'll hopefully have almost three walls done.  Thanks to Dan and Barb for all their help with the work and for taking pictures.

Some days, we wish we had a pickup of our own.  Between two station wagons (it pains me to call our beloved Malibu Maxx a station wagon, but it's much shorter than "four-door hatchback sedan),  we got 100 7-foot studs, 12 8-foot studs, and three solid core doors from Menards to the basement.  We have enough supplies to keep us working for quite a while.

The day's other big purchases - a nail gun and, um, one of those 22-caliber nailer driver thingies.  In case that description doesn't do much for you, it drives nails into concrete, through our base plate stud.  It does this by using a bullet-like charge.  Both tools are truly impressive, and make the work much easier.  They also make Craig feel awfully cool.  Our original intent was to rent a nail gun, but we determined at the last minute that buying one, then selling it when we were done, would be cheaper.  So, wanna buy a lightly used framing nailer?  Let us know in a month or two.

I spent a lot of time on Saturday insulating the rim joist.  I hope I did everything right, because it felt like a really inexact science.  We cut a piece of batt insulation to size, stuffed the trimmed piece into the space between the floor joists, and then finished with the piece that was cut to size.  I tried my best to staple the kraft facing to the joists and the floor above it, but it didn't always work perfectly.  For now, I'm going with the sentiment that any insulation is better than no insulation.

The nail gun in action. 

The nail gun in action, again.  We're using the Dan Freeman method of framing - anchoring one base plate, then building an entire frame that can be pushed up into place.  This avoids a lot of toenailing, which makes Dan furrow his brow, get out the level, and look like he's thinking really hard.

ONE stud wall in place, hah, hah, hah.