The Basement Walls: Done!

And to think this all started because I wanted an empty cubby!

I started rearranging, purging and prettifying the basement in February, though we didn't actually start work on the walls until March.

I was enrolled in the Organize Your Creative Space Class at Simplify 101 and the Photo Freedom class at Big Picture Classes. I got the idea that I wanted to organize the Big Open Area in the diagram below into a back up scraproom area.

As I shuffled things around the make that happen, my husband decided we should finish insulating the basement. That meant repairing and patching the concrete, framing and putting up insulation, and then putting up wallboard on two and a half walls. (The area in pink below.)

This diagram is not to scale! (I hope you can read it.)

Wow. Looking at that, I realise what a big job it really was. No wonder it took 3 months and a bit.

Phase 1:
a) The Area under the Stairs.

We insulated the Laundry Room/Pantry area of the basement in October of 2011. I'm not exactly sure why we procrastinated this part. Maybe because it is just so full of stuff we didn't want to deal with it?

You can see where the white wall board stops: my husband didn't think to line it up with where the insulation stops. That caused a minor hassle trying to attach the new wallboard.

He and my son took Spring Break (the last week of March) to frame and put up the insulation and wallboard.

I like this shot I took after painting the area under the stairs ocean blue because you can see all the way into the "games room."

b) The Games Room

This started as wasted space. It held a lat pull down machine no one had used in over 15 years.

I sold it. I wanted it gone so badly, we even delivered it to a small town forty five minutes north of us.

With that space empty, we set it up as a "games room" for my son so I could work in the main area (where he had been) getting rid of stuff.

Then, after about a month, we moved him out again so they could get to work. There were a lot of pipes to figure out how to go around and deal with over in this part.

Part of the south wall. That black pipe is my kitchen drain.

Part of the east wall. The wall o' shelves start right at the right edge of this photo. Those white pipes are the intake and outake pipes for our High Efficiency furnace.

 

Here's a blurry shot of my two workmen!

They went around the corner a bit.

Things stayed like this until my husband had another week off at the end of April.


Phase 2:
The Wall O' Shelves

I started working on the shelves in February.

Should I show you what I started with in January? It is a wee bit embarrassing.

Things were a bit better by the beginning of March. At least I could get to them!

Just before we took them down in late April, I made up this info graphic to help me figure out where to put things back.

I made one for each of the four columns of shelves. They were very helpful, as a matter of fact.

My husband and I had everything down in half a day.

The window had been covered with black paper. I hadn't even realised there was one there.

After my husband patched the walls and welet it all dry, the wall went up fast.

We used scrap pieces of wallboard going into the corner. They're behind the shelves, anyway.  My husband figures we saved about $100 doing that.

I painted the shelves outside over the course of a few days.

Sorry for the blur. This was taken from the window on the stair landing. That's the last of the snow on the ground back by the garage.

And here we are, today.

I will be putting the curtains back up after I get them washed.

I purged a lot and I sold a lot to make this happen. I went through every. little. thing. We also moved the furniture around. But that? That is a story for another day.

For now, it's done.

Linking to Jules of The William Morris Project at Pancakes and French Fries.