Before (basically):
When we bought this house the basement was a whole other story. Apparently we didn't even get a legit "before" photo of it because it was so ugly I thought it might break our camera. These first photos I took of the basement are from after we took out the big boards off the pony wall and the baseboards.
Everything down there was nasty. The pink carpets were COVERED in stains and hair and dirt. The baseboards were sticky and oozing and had a million little crumbs and odds and ends stuck behind them. The walls were dented every couple of inches and painted right up onto the ceiling with a nice peachy tan color. Gag. The basement had obviously been renovated by someone who had no idea what they were doing and the electrical was a mess, as were all of the finishings. It really was a nightmare and we had soooo much to do, we had to start small and focus on one part at a time.
So the first thing we focused on were the pony walls. We tore out these big weird boards they had nailed on and put in new drywall and clean corners.
Unfortunately the framing under the boards was extremely uneven and also disgusting. We had to do some leveling before we could drywall over it
The mudding of all these corners and edges was impossibly hard and took us forever…
Here's the men at work:
One of the two bedrooms had this extremely low duct on the ceiling, which we discovered was just framed badly and had a ton of empty space below the ductwork. Air went ahead and tore it down, re-did the framing, put up new drywall and wa-la!
Mom and Dad came to help me paint everything!! So thankful to them for all the hours of work they have put into this renovation for us.
(for reference, my paint choice is the middle one here by Behr):
We finally said goodbye to the pink carpet and everything looked completely different.
Thanks so much to these awesome family members for coming to do the heavy labor since I was kinda prego...
Carpet installers came and we were over-the-moon excited when we saw the new underlay being fitted… and that night we got to go peek at it before he came back to finish the next day. HEAVEN!!!
And then it was DONE!
Mom and Dad came back to help with a few more touch-ups, and Air worked on baseboards for dayzzzzz:
One final project that Air wanted to do was make a little door for this weird little hole in the wall that connects to the space under the stairs. We figured it would be nice to have access from both sides so he just made it look super nice.
here's the hole with tons of boxes shoved in there (don't mind the mess):
and the finished project:
And that's about it! We also got a new washer/dryer in the laundry room… but that room still needs a lot more work. Maybe we'll renovate it someday?
more to come, of course!
