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. 

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

Seeing Pink

I had Columbus day off as a holiday from work last week, and spent the day finishing most of the insulation downstairs.... And now the basement is all insulated! Matt went through and used cans of simple spray foam to fill in any larger cracks, and now all that is really left is to tape the seams.

This was a surprisingly easy project! I mean, it still took time (maybe 2 full weekend days and a few week nights finishing up and doing the spray foam), but it was a pretty simple and low stress step that I'm glad we did ourselves.

Here were the basics. We are by no means experts, but these are the steps we took from the research we did reading up on the product and from asking folks at Home Depot.

1. Cleaned the cement walls of dust and debris (used our broom and swept them really well to get rid of cobwebs, dirt, concrete dust, etc).
2. Measured each section of wall from floor to the top of the wall (it varied by a few inches around the house since our house is so old and its settled and some additions had been made to the house)
3. Marked these measurements on the the large pieces of hard insulation, cut them with a simple razor blade, snapped them apart.
4. Applied ample adhesive to the backs on the insulation pieces (I think we went through about 20-25 tubes of it... there should be a picture of the type we used in a previous post)
5. Put the pieces up and pushed them tight to the wall to make sure they were secure.
6. Used spray foam to fill larger cracks around the crawl space and on the top of the walls (where there are spaces by our wood beams).
7. Tape the remaining seams between each piece of hard insulation to prevent moisture coming through from the cement walls.

Woo hoo. On to the subfloor next....