A room takes shape

Kevin has been working his ass off on the basement bathroom, trying to get it as close to “finished” as possible before the wall-anchor guys show up to shore up the basement and make sure our house doesn’t collapse into a crater in the earth. Isn’t that nice of him?

Just starting to frame up the walls

In order to install the shower stall we chose, he’s going to have to move the floor drain a little, which entailed busting up a square of foundation that hasn’t been touched in about 60 years. First, he tried using some sort of diamond-edged saw blade. Then he tried using a hammer and chisel. THEN, he Hulked out and just hammered away at the concrete like John Henry and that’s what did the job. Look at that virgin soil! I should snag some for the garden this year.

the results of a little John Henry action

I can’t wait until the basement is done and we can get to work getting Galaga and Space Invaders cleaned up and up and running again.

walls mostly framed

Can I tell you how happy I’ll be to get a rebate check from our electric utility for all the insulation we’re buying up for the basement?

walls framed, outer-wall insulation up, starting on the drywall

Hey, guess what! It’s hard to take pictures inside a tiny room. It’s turning into a legitimate bathroom, though! Yay!

DRYWALL!

Basement bathroom demo

So, do you guys remember the bathroom in our basement, the one that belonged in a horror movie? This one:

When we moved in, we were so overwhelmed by projects in areas of the house that we use everyday, as well as how stinking awful that room was, that we basically shut the door to this bathroom and never used the room (except in extreme poop emergencies, since there’s only one other bathroom in the house). It was really easy to forget that the room was even there. It was a sort of time capsule, illustrating the overall effect of the state of the house when we took it over.

Welllll, Kevin got a wild hair up his ass last night and decided to tear it down, as a way of busting into our giant “To Do” list that we’re going to be covering over the next year or so. The list has been looming largely since we received funding to do some major renovations around the holidays, and it’s been difficult to decide where to start. Not anymore!

I think it’s time for a pretty major hardware store run, don’t you?

Where do we start?

The problem with having such a long list of things that need to be done (or purchased) is that it’s difficult to know where to start. Well, we KNOW where to start: the basement walls. They’re cracked and bowing, and they need to be addressed first. We’re going to be installing wall anchors to pull the walls straight from the outside, and that’ll probably be done first thing after the ground thaws out and dries out this spring. It’ll be a pretty big, expensive project, although hopefully it’ll be taken care of within a few days’ time.

The problem, then, is figuring out what to tackle first after the walls are completed. Here are a few prospects:

• Tearing up every square millimeter of carpeting in the house and installing hardwood flooring ourselves
• Tearing out and rebuilding the basement bathroom
• Tearing out and replacing the stairs leading down to the basement, and walling-off the stairs and putting a door at the bottom of them so that it’s a separate space that isn’t open to the upstairs
• New couch
• The Kitchen of Doom

I’m going to follow this up with a series of posts filled with ideas that I have for these projects.
Where would you start?