Bar Lights

The bar in our basement finally has lights installed. We found some hanging lights we liked at ikea (and the price was right at $14 each)... but once we got home realized they had plugs on the ends of them like you would plug into a wall outlet... not wires to install them straight into the ceiling wiring. Hmmm.

But after some quick DIY research we learned you can easily cut those plugs off the lights, wire them correctly to the ceiling electrical which we already had set up, and then buy a simple white cover plate to finish it off (for about $2 each at the hardware store).

And here they are, we love how they turned out and that the bar is feeling much more finished!

The Basement Bar

The basement has been our long work in progress... and we always planned to eventually put in a bar/kitchenette once it was finished to make the main living room a true "entertainment room". Well, we were finally at a place where we could get started on the bar (basement was painted, carpeted, most of the molding done, and other projects).... so it was time to look at cabinets.

Since it is our basement and not our main kitchen, we didn't want to spend a ton of money (goal for the whole Kitchenette was to keep it under about $1,200 - $1,500). After looking at quite a few options we ended up back at our good old Ikea and picked out base cabinets, a counter-top and sink. All the cabinets are white which we knew we from the beginning (they should "pop" nicely against the dark grey wall). Once the bottom cabinets & counter-top are done we'll go back in the next month or two and get the upper cabinets... we couldn't decide which size we wanted and thought this could just wait until the main part was done.

The whole process was pretty easy to get everything at Ikea (they had friendly folks on hand to help us get a list of all the pieces needed - and since we had everything measured ahead of time it went much quicker). Then we just had to go to the warehouse and pick everything up.

We can't wait for it to finally be finished and invite friends over to hang out, watch football games, have some drinks, and have plenty of space!

Here are the first pictures of it in progress....

Lots of boxes (this is actually less than half of them)

In progress, making sure things are level. 

The Ikea cabinets come with black legs that are adjustable to help level things... which was super nice for this do-it-yourself project since our basement floor can be a "bit" uneven in places. 

Cabinets put together, and the white back & side panels on. Oak counter-top on. 

 A view from the other side. We still need to install the metal handles on the drawers and cabinet doors. 

The sink. We still need to hook up the plumbing and caulk it. (you can see it is currently a storage space for all our extra cabinet hardware). 

Paint & Carpet

Last week was a busy one. We spent Saturday/Sunday painting the basement with the primer, and then everything white. Then Monday and Tuesday I painted the main living room light grey and the bar area dark grey (it took 2 days since we did 2 coats and touch ups). My Dad even came down Tuesday night to help me paint which made things go much quicker! And while I worked on this Matt did the covers on all the lights and started finishing out the electrical outlets.

We were on a tight timeline since we scheduled carpet installation for Wednesday, and then had visitors coming that weekend. It all got done though which was amazing! Carpet was installed Wednesday, we got home that night and started moving all our boxes and stuff from upstairs down to the basement so that we could make our office upstairs into a suitable guest bedroom for my friends arriving on Thursday.

And here are a few pictures of the latest basement with paint and now carpet. Next up molding and doors...

It's hard to get a good picture of carpet. But in case you are wondering it's "loop" carpet, from the Martha Stewart line at Home Depot (made by Shaw). We chose the color "Glass of Milk" to keep it light colored in the basement. It's very plush (we got an extra good pad underneath it)... and a great bonus is that it has a 30 year warranty. 

You can already see the closet in our future office filling up with suitcases/Christmas decorations/my wedding dress boxed up/Matt's boxes of comics.... at least it's not upstairs anymore! 

Paint colors

We are actually painting the basement this weekend/week. Can't believe it. We started on Saturday by painting the whole basement with drywall primer and sealer. Matt was able to borrow a nice paint sprayer from a friend, so I think that made it go pretty quickly.

After many paint samples and going back and forth on colors, I think we have decided on our colors. We want the basement to feel airy and light (not dark since it's a basement) - so we are going with lots of white, with light grey, and some dark grey accents. We also plan to have some yellow accents once we have furniture and decor downstairs... I'm picturing yellow pillows on a dark grey couch, and my yellow glassybaby candles.

So... all of the ceiling and most of the walls (the office and bedroom in the basement for now) will be white... it's actually a shade of off-white which is not pure white, but still seems pretty white to me. Then the whole living room will have light grey walls (which we are hoping will make all of the white moulding really "pop"). And finally the kitchenette/bar area will have a very dark grey wall color, which we think will look cool against the bright white cabinets we plan to get.

So there you go. Wish us luck! A few last pictures of our white painted basement before the colors go on...

Office 

Living Room (ok not totally white... you can see some grey paint samples we were trying out on the wall)

And.... the final paint swatches... =) 

Basement update: Mud & Tape

I was working from home on Thursday morning this week for a few hours, so that I could meet with our carpet installer and he could do measurements. While waiting for him I took a look in at how the drywall mud and taping is going.

These guys have major skill. Makes me embarrassed to look at the 3 foot patch of drywall we did ourselves 6 months ago when we pulled an old freezer out of our kitchen wall. Oh well, at least I have learned now that this is one project to leave to the pro's. They are so fast, and everything looks perfectly smooth....

Best day ever... Drywall

We officially have drywall in our basement! It all went in yesterday (all in 1 day) as planned. It will still be another 5-7 days (planning on next Friday) for it to officially be done, since they need to tape and plaster it, and apparently there is drying time needed between each time they plaster and sand it.

In case anyone is wondering, it cost us a total of $3,000 for the whole basement to be drywalled including all the mud and taping. We also saved about $500 by doing all the cleanup of the drywall scraps and taking them to the dump ourselves. Seriously the best money we have EVER spent. SO happy.

Here are a few pictures:

Matt contemplating how amazing a drywalled basement is

 The view from our living room

View from the other side of our living room

Looking into our future office.. this room is going to be pretty big (seems larger now that there are real walls for some reason). Can't wait to move our desk and bookshelves down here and make it feel like a real grown up office/library. 

The far back guest room... had a difficult time getting a picture of this room, it's not actually that small, but there isn't a light in there yet and was hard getting a good picture from any angle. Still lots of drywall scraps in this picture too. 

Last pictures of the basement before drywall

I cannot believe it was 1 year ago this weekend, that we were demolishing our basement and tearing out drywall, wood, cabinets, flooring, insulation.... pretty much everything down to the necessary wood structure and concrete. It has been a crazy year with lots of surprises and frustrations. But we are almost done! We can't believe it.

This weekend we did some very last things to get the basement ready to be drywalled (the drywall crew was scheduled to come and there was no more delaying things!). We finished any last electrical projects we wanted done before drywall, including wiring lights for above the future bar as well as wiring cable/internet/electrical behind our walls so that when we finally mount our TV on the wall there will be NO cords hanging on the wall... anywhere...yessss.

Matt worked quite a bit on final framing to make sure there weren't any spots that would be a problem for the drywalls to install, and there was also a lot of just general clean up this weekend.

Today (Monday) we insulated the ceiling of the entire basement. With the help of my wonderful parents (who volunteered to spend their entire memorial day helping us do this today)... we got the entire basement insulated in just about 5 hours, faster than I expected, but also dirtier and itchier (even wearing goggles and a mask that stuff gets everywhere and it is itchy!)  And then we celebrated with some BBQ'ing.

Finally, I took about 200 pictures (literally) so that if we ever need to know where things are behind the walls we can refer to the photos first before ever having to cut into the drywall later. Matt had me take a picture from each direction going between every beam (I think that was about 80 pictures...), and then we took lots of extra pictures of all the the plumbing and electrical in the walls.

Anyhow... here are just a few pictures of the rooms to enjoy, before it is all white and drywalled tomorrow! We will keep everyone updated on the progress over the next few weeks.

Part of the future living room and bar/kitchenette 

The other half of the living room on the other side of the stairs. 

Looking into our future office (the extra large door opening will be for french doors)

Another look at where the bar will be. 

Stairs coming down into the basement. 

What we've been up to

I have been bad at blogging this last couple months. We've been busy, with life, work, and house projects... but for some reason I have failed to really take any pictures (and in my mind there is no point in posting a blog post without pictures). Well I figured I should just get over it and post an update anyways... and make an effort for more pictures from now on.

Updates on the House... lots and lots of little projects... including finishing wood framing in random places to get it finally ready for drywall. This included framing in places like the ceilings of the closets in the basement, and around the main beam (so that its all the same size and will be smooth once we drywall). I give all credit for this to Matt. I am useless when it comes to framing walls or anything else in that realm.

We also have an official start date for when drywall goes in! The day after Memorial Day weekend, May 31st, we will have contractors in our house and drywall is going in! Overall they think it will take them 1 day to drywall our whole basement, but then 8-10 days total for all the mud and taping and sanding and texturing (with dry time in between some days). Super excited this is going to be done by professionals and we know for sure when it's happening now. 

This also means the next 2 weeks we are going to be full force working on the house to be 100% ready for drywall. Our last projects will include: insulation in the basement ceiling (this weekend), getting internet & cable hooked up and wired to the basement (so that the wires will be behind the walls), and lots of clean up of supplies and tools...

I promise I will take pictures as the next few weeks unfold and things quickly progress with the house!

Lights in the Basement

The hardware for most of the new Can Lights in our basement is now installed. Matt said it was fairly simple nailing them in between the beams in the ceiling. Now he is hooking up the wiring to them...and as you can see some of them are already working.

Once they are ALL finished, we are putting insulation in the ceiling (which will hopefully help with noise between up and downstairs) and then drywall on the ceiling, and finally finished covers on the lights.

Matt taking a short break tonight while I snuck in to take a couple pictures. Such a hard worker. I am trying to get as much motivation as him, but have a hard time coming home from work on weeknights and wanting to work on the house.



Electrical work on the basement

Matt took this last week off of work, and got a ton of work done on our basement getting the electrical all started. We are rewiring everything. Putting in all new outlets, switches,  new lights in the ceiling, and re-organizing most of our electrical panel.

The electrical in the basement was updated at some point (over the last 40 years probably?), but still really old and unfortunately some of it not to code. So that is why we are just replacing all of it. We have even found in a few small places where (when they originally replaced all the "Knob & Tube" wiring at some point) they left small sections in place, yikes! So luckily all of that is removed and taken care of now too.

We decided on can lights for most of the ceiling, and are picking out some larger lights for the bedroom and den in the basement. We also got some cool hanging lights from ikea to put over our future bar. 

The basement is a mess right now. It stresses me out to go down there, haha, just tools and electrical stuff everywhere, as well as sawdust from all the drilling through 2x4's. 

New boxes for where wires from different parts of the basement connect. Apparently this is "code" and is not how it was done before. Matt also replaced the wiring going to our hot water heater, and added a switch so it can easily be turned on and off from electrical (also code these days). 

 New wires and outlets in, yay.

New framing around the column at the bottom of our stairs, where we will now have switches for all the lights in the main living room/bar entertainment area.



More building

This post is a bit delayed, forgot to put it up last weekend... but figured I would still share now.
The (hopefully) last building project we had to do in the basement before we can really dive into all the electrical is done! We have already made a few updates with minor electrical things (moving a few wires, etc. we ran into as we were building some last walls)... but the major re-wiring of the basement is hopefully happening the end of January when Matt has a full week off of work.

Anyways, back to current projects. We had to build soffits around the main line of duct work in the basement so that when it comes time to drywall, we can actually put drywall around all of the ductwork.

Another wall built

Matt finished another wall in the basement this week. We have realized building walls is pretty simple. This one took us a bit longer to decide how to do though, since it will have a door in it.

I mean it's just wood and screws... doesn't sounds that complicated right? But do we want a normal solid wood door or a french door? We finally decided french doors would be cool since it will be between part of our basement living room and the bedroom downstairs we are making into our new office. That way we can keep the doors open if we want and make it feel even more open downstairs. So then we had to decide the size (4 foot wide or 5 foot wide seemed the most common)? Finally after measurements and such we decided on a 4 foot wide version... and then Matt just had to buid the wall which will eventually support that door.

It was a little hard to capture a picture of it with the bad lighting in the basement right now and all the construction mess... but here you go!

Electrical

That's right, we are doing the electrical in our basement ourselves. Luckily all the electrical that was already in the basement wasn't too old, so it's mainly just adding new lights and outlets, and moving much of the wiring around so that it works better for our needs.

The first thing we had to do was map the electrical in our whole house. Since this house had been remodeled so many times over the years and new outlets and things added, the notes on the panel were outdated and there was no good way to know which outlets or lights were hooked up to which switches on our electrical panel.

We are reading a book on DIY electrical, and the way they suggested you do this is turning off every breaker on your electrical panel and then turning on one at a time to test which outlets and lights are "on" connecting to it.  After you find out which switch goes to an outlet, you right that number down next to it on the map of the house and then on to the next.

 This handy tool, you stick the metal end into an outlet (or up against a loose wire) and if its "on" the little tool buzzes really loud (kind of like a smoke detector sound).

For some outlets we were having a hard time figuring out... here is another strategy we used. This tool we borrowed from a friend, and you plug the black piece into an outlet which is "on", and then you go to the electrical panel and put this yellow piece next to each switch until it buzzes loudly. This was a much easier way to figure out which outlets went to which switches on the panel. Unfortunately it didn't really help with ceiling lights... so for those we were back to the first strategy.

The whole process only took maybe 4-5 hours, although I'm sure someone skilled could do it more quickly.


On a side note... you know how you tell kids not to stick their fingers in outlets? I also learned you should never touch the sides of them if they are exposed. =)  Those little round metal pieces on the sides of this outlet (hanging from out ceiling) gave me quite the shock when I went to grab it so I could stick the outlet tester in it. One tingling arm later and now I know...

More walls up, more floor down

We tried to be extra productive this last weekend, since we only have 1 more weekend until Thanksgiving and then Holidays are in full swing and we'll be busy every weekend in December.

So, we got more walls put up, and are getting sooo close to having all the subfloor done. The Subfloor is really my project (I guess Matt figured I couldn't screw that up, haha), and while it was kind of fun at first... that quickly grew old. We just have so many odd shaped areas and nooks where you have to cut the panels to fit, such a pain. Oh well, one upside is that I have been forced to become comfortable using the power saw... and after about panel 100... I have to say I feel like a pro. =) Ok, not a pro, but at least I'm not scared to death of sawing off a finger anymore.