We're close to completing our basement renovation. Here's the first wave of pictures.
This is the view from the bottom of the steps, just as we were starting to empty out the area in advance of the contractors coming in to start building. The plan is for a full bedroom shuffle. Caitie gets Clark's room. Clark gets the current spare room (which is full of card games, books and the iMac). And the basement becomes the new place for card games, books and the iMac.
Guess I should draw you a map, a so-not-to-scale one.
Up until now, the basement has been mainly overflow storage, with a big Joe-space off to one side. With my comics and computer parts over by the AC unit, I had sort of an office area down there. Of course, I never used it, because the exposed cat litter area and general basement unpleasantness (too cold for 9 months out of the year!) made it dusty and uncomfortable. But if I needed a length of ethernet, that's where it was.
We decided to leave the southern strip unfinished, from the sump pump to the AC. That sump pump HAS to stay super-accessible, because whenever we get heavy rain, I like to keep an eye on it and make sure we're shifting water properly. Our house is at the bottom of a hill, so our land takes on much of the neighborhood runoff. We were starting to get leaks on the wall by the cat litter zone.
Note that our basement has no egress, which sucks. Legally, we're not allowed to turn it into a bedroom since there's NO WAY OUT. So the chief hurdle for making a living, awesome basement room revolves around getting decent-sized furniture down there!
Also, no bathroom stuff was planned for this renovation. Sorry.
That picture shows the "office" area in the distance.
One really smart angle to our basement design is that all of the obnoxious basement necessities were stuck on the south side. That entire northern region is free of PVC pipes, electrical boxes and whatever else.
The contractor said to move as much stuff out of the basement as possible. We moved just about everything upstairs, except for most of the office zone (comics are smegging heavy.) He warned us that it would get dusty, and that was an understatement.
Let me tell you something about cat vomit on concrete: you can't clean it up. Sure, you can scoop up the solid material, the undigested cat food filler bleached of artificial colors by feline stomach acid and bloated with wetness. And you can toss the matted fur clogs, turds of hair still rounded like a kitty esophagus. But the accompanying liquid? That shit stains the concrete forever. Our basement floor was like Memory Lane for cat puke.
That was another big reason why we needed a basement room. You can actually clean vomit off of carpet.
Here is the view (standing near my beloved sump pump), just before construction began. We probably should have moved more stuff upstairs, but we filled the dining room and most of the playroom with basement junk... a good portion of which was stuff that we hated, which explained why it has been dumped in the basement for most of our marriage.
Our contractor said two weeks to finish the room, not including painting or carpet. The carpet we have to get somebody else to do, and we said we would paint the room ourselves.
Two weeks later, when he offered to paint the room for X dollars more, we jumped at it like hobos for a wine bottle.
Here's the nice stairway landing they put in. You might also notice the cool 45-degree angle bump-out they built around the hot water heater, so we could still store stuff under the stairs without having to inch around the thing. The contractors noticed that we have 45-degree angle elements on the other floors, so they came up with that as a cool solution that fit the rest of the house. That, friends, is the kind of contractor you want.
When the insulation went up, the entire room felt 50% smaller and we were all sad.
But what made us sadder was Snowmageddon 2010, which seriously delayed our construction. Thanks to the stupid weather - and us adding in the paint job at the end - the total build time was more like three weeks plus.
More photos to come... wherein I answer the question "But where are the cats?"
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