My DIY chair project

When we bought our house there were all sorts of suprises, one of which was all the random things the previous owners left behind. Most of it went to the dump, but I saved this one really old looking chair with intentions to re-finish it at one point.

Matt conintually complained as we stored it in the basement and I kept having to move it to keep it out of the way of other projects... but I kept promising I was going to do something with it at some point. =)

Well last weekend I finally did. After removing the old flowery fabric and stuffing, sanding the chair down, and then painting it white... I added new foam padding and cute blue/white fabric which I attached with silver tacks. It was all super easy, and I think it turned out pretty cute! I plan to put the chair in our bedroom (it will go with the blue/white/grey theme in there).

And here are a few pictures:

After fabric & stuffing was removed, and being sanded.

After the first coat of white spray paint. (I did 2 more coats)

With new padding and fabric!

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.

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!