a work in progress

Two and a half years ago when Kyle and I were looking to buy our house, we talked about wanting to finish the basement. We only have three bedrooms and knew once two kids came it would be nice for company to have a place of their own. Plus we wanted a little more space for a playroom and I was hoping to move my scrapbook room out of the walk-in closet. :-) When we found out baby number 2 was on his way we began seriously talking about the basement and after getting several bids we decided to take the plunge and finish it off. We figured the sooner the better...no point in finishing the basement and then moving a few years later. We want to enjoy it so what better time than now? The men started Aug. 12 and other than a few glitches we are moving right along. Lyla loves running around the house saying "mennn wok" and now because this week the plumber was here she's been saying "plumber Joe". (The plumbers name is Joe). Here are a few pictures of the work in progress. I'm sure for those of you who haven't been to the house it's not so easy to picture so I guess you'll just have to use your imagination.

Here's the view from the top of the stairs. Nothing too exciting other than you can see the framing and that they cut part of the wall out.
We have a walk-out basement so this is looking towards the back wall of the house.

This is looking at the soon to be bedroom. It's hard to include it all in the picture. At the front left of the picture behind the pole will be the closet. Right below the arrow point is the doorway into the room.

This might be a better side view of the room. I'm standing in the soon to be family/tv room although tv room is all relative because we have no plans to buy a tv for that room any time soon. :-)

This is the back wall of the house from inside the bedroom. You can see studs and then an opening in the middle. We had them cut a hole in the wall for a window. And for those of you that are extra observant, you'll see that the window does not match the other windows downstairs. Not to worry. They cut a hole for the window and then opened the box to find the window rep ordered them the wrong one. So they had to install the wrong one temporarily until the correct one came. Since the picture was taken the correct window was installed.

This is a view of me standing in the soon to be bedroom looking the length of the basement. It will go bedroom, family/tv room and then end with the scrapbook/kids art room closest to the hot water heater/furnace. You can see the framing of the scrapbook room.
Here's another picture of the back wall. We are doing a shelf ledge which I think we're going to really like. We also traded out these steel doors for more energy efficient fiberglass french doors but I took the picture before those were installed. The new doors look really nice and add extra light in the room which is always a plus for basements.

If you click on the picture you might be able to see the rough sketch of the bathroom in chalk. We're doing a shower, toilet, vanity and linen closet. Nothing fancy, just enough to meet our needs for company or if we're down there playing. To make things a little more complicated though, we are pulling the vanity/sink from our main floor 1/2 bath and putting it down in this bathroom and then installing a pedestal sink in the 1/2 bath. It was cheaper, but more than that, all of our cabinets in the entire house are the same thing, both bathroom and kitchen. They are custom made cabinets. For us to buy a new vanity for the downstairs bath to match the others would have been too expensive and thought putting a pedestal sink in the 1/2 bath wouldn't look as mismatched as if we would have just bought a random vanity for the basement. That's really about all for now. Most of the plumbing work is done (at least what can be done until drywall is in) other than installing the stand-up shower. The electrician comes next week and then the following week, providing we pass inspection, the "mennn" can start installing the sheetrock. It's fun to go down there each day and see our vision start to come together. So far we are happy with how things are turning out. We are also doing two minor things on the main floor to add a little more seperation to our house. Right now it's just 4 main outer walls which means if we want to paint then we have to paint the entire first floor. I like open but ours is a little too open so the guys are doing a few things up here. I'll post those pictures soon but I can't seem to find my "before" pictures of that that I took. I'll try to find them and then I'll post those pics as well.