New lights

We have some new light fixtures in the house, a new light over our dining room table and a new light fixture in the baby's room. It is amazing how much new lighting changes the feel of a room.

The light over our dining room table we actually found about 4-5 months ago (at Crate & Barrel online) and ordered it. It seemed huge when it finally came in the mail, but I was hopeful it would look great and so we stored it for about 4 months in the basement... and when the wiring was finally done in our attic last weekend we were able to install it! I really like how it turned out and think it fits perfectly in our upstairs.

The baby's room light fixture we got at Ikea (for about $40), and Matt installed this in last weekend as well since all the new wiring was done and we were anxious to see how it would look. We love how modern it looks, yet "fun" for a kids room, and it will go great with our white & grey theme.

Dining Room light

Baby's room light



A new railing

Not a super exciting update, but since we having been working on finishing out the basement with molding lately we finally also finished the railing on the "half wall" around our stairs which go down to the basement. The top of the wall was unfinished after it was drywalled, since we still needed to add a wood top to it (you could still see the edges of the drywall). So Matt spent a couple hours one night this week and got it done pretty quickly! Now I think I will just paint it white so it blends in better with the rest of our house and the molding everywhere.

More electrical updates... and a new fan

This is where Matt has spent most of this weekend, up in our attic. He has been working on electrical still, and since he has just about everything in the basement done now, he figured he should do the updates in our attic we have been putting off while everything in the basement is still open and there is easier access to the panel and things. 
The reason for the attic electrical updates is that it still had some horrible knob & tube wiring going to a couple of our upstairs ceiling lights. This came up when we had our inspection, but it was not clear what the extent was. We realized it was not just a couple places in the ceiling, but everything in our upstairs ceilings (Bedroom light, Bathroom lights, Kitchen ceiling lights, Living Room fan, Office lights)

 (You can see a bit of it in the picture below with the white knobs with tubing running between them). Happily... every last bit of the old stuff is disconnected now, and about half is re-wired with new wire.

After the wiring in the attic above our bedroom was replaced, we decided to throw out the old ceiling fan in our room today and buy a new one and hook it up.  Here is Matt putting in the new mounting for the fan with the new wires, and new fan below.

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.



My first attempt at Drywall

While Matt was busy working on electrical... last weekend I decided I needed a project to work on at the house. SO, I took my first try at installing some drywall. It was easier in some ways than I imagined (the measurig and cutting of it was quite easy), and yet took me much longer than I thought (getting it level and screwed in with one person was not so easy)... but that's how you learn and I'm sure next time will go faster. Haha, and there will be plenty of basement for me to practice on.

I covered up our half-wall/railing that goes around our staircase leading down to the basement. We rebuilt this when we tore out the full floor-to-ceiling walls around the staircase when the new stairs went in earlier. It won't be finished of course until we mud and tape it (which we are planning to hire someone to do once the whole basement has drywall)... but it is nice to have it covered and more finished looking (meaning there aren't just 2x4's framed together and open to stairs where a small child could fall through). 

A couple pictures to prove I did it!

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.

And we have heat

After having our furnace replaced a few months ago, we now finally have heat! We technically could have turned it on long ago, but there were a couple projects we wanted to finish first and it hadn't really been cold so there was no need. The basement crawlspace door (leading under our front porch) needed to have a new door built around it and insulated... no point in turning our heat on if it would all just flow right outside through that).

We also had to have the final duct work finished (which wasn't done before since we had to rebuild the stairs first, as that ductwork comes upstairs from up under the staircase). The stairs were finished about a month ago, and so we scheduled the guy that did our furnace and duct work originally and he came in this week and it all got done!  P.S. we used James Heating & More (he is a local guy in West Seattle) and he was great... very nice and easy to work with, and we felt very fairly priced.

The last week it turned a bit chilly, nothing we couldn't handle... but it is so nice to have heat again and know we will be warm and cozy (and energy efficient) this winter!



Matt after a long day working on the basement

New crawlspace door and insulation

It even has a lock... nothing is getting in here. =)

Here is the new railing/half wall around the staircase upstairs, with final duct work put in. Our house/furnace will now circulate air throughout the upstairs & downstairs (before there was only an air in-take vent in our basement, so the furnace was just pulling air in from there and then circulating that throughout the house), which will keep it even warmer & more efficient

Furnace project update

Well, our furnace project in the basement is finally done. The old one was removed, and a new one installed. The gas line was also moved, and the duct work replaced (and some of it moved to make room for our new staircase that will be built). We are so excited to move on to more projects now....Matt has already begun building some of the new walls (more of that later)!

Here is a look at our old furnace. I'm pretty sure it could qualify as an antique!

Hmm... apparently the furnace had not been cleaned since 1994? Hopefully that wasn't correct and the sticker just wasn't updated, haha. Oh well, we have a new one now anyways!

 

And here is a look at the new one!

Looking forward to having a much more efficient house this winter once we need heat (it should save us almost $300-500 per year we estimate on gas bills), and it has a feature we didn't have before that circulates the air from downstairs to upstairs.... so even though we dont have AC we can cool down the house in the summer with the cool basement air. 

Overall, the project including the new furnace plus installation cost us about $5,500. We should be able to get a rebate on the new efficient furnace though, which will be nice to get somewhere close to $1,000 of that back!

A piece of advice...

For any other home owners out there... (Warning Reader Beware: some gross and graphic details below)

So when we first bought our house, Matt thought there was a slightly gross smell in one of the rooms in the basement. We could never figure out what it was, but we never spent much time down there (pretty much only stored boxes) so didn't worry about it too much. Well every time we went down there though it drove Matt nuts, so we figured during this basement remodel and demolition we would figure it out.... and boy did we!

We have never seen a mouse since we have lived in this house. That said, apparently the previous owners did.... and the way they decided to solve it is where my advice comes in.

You know those mouse traps that snap close? Yeah they freak me out and are probably disgusting to deal with once they have caught a mouse. Probably also what the previous owner was thinking... so instead they decided... "hey, why not try poisen tablets?".  Doesn't seem like the worst idea right? The mice eat it, die, and you dont have to deal with those messy mouse traps. WRONG.

Poison tablets were tossed up into the "drop" ceiling in one of the basement bedrooms. The mice of course proceeded to eat it. This is where is gets bad. They then probably took about a week to die... making a HORRIBLE mess throughout the insulation (just think if you were poisoned what would happen). Luckily this was contained to one room. When we (and again by "we", I mean Matt in this horrible instance), pulled out all the insulation in the ceiling... debris came falling down that I wouldn't wish on anyone.

After all that and about 5 old petrified mice later....ewww good lord they had to have been up there about 5 years!... the smell was gone! Thank the lord.

Now I hope we never get mice while we are actually living in this house, and I hope nobody else out there does either. But if you DO.... learn from this and just use the old fashioned mouse traps.

The Furnace project

Our recent project on the basement is getting our furnace replaced, and we will be moving some of the duct work. We had 3 estimates done, and then chose our guy to do the work in a couple weeks!

In the meantime, to save some money.... we (and by "we" I mean Matt) tore out the old duct work. That way we dont have to pay to have the old duct taken out, something Matt thought we could easily do, and when they come in it will be all ready to put in the new furnace & re-route the duct.

The Basement: the plan

Matt measured everything in the basement again, and drew up a plan for our basement remodel. Its fun to visualize what we are working towards!  I added notes to his drawing, labeling what we are thinking each room will be used for...