The Basement!! (& a bedroom)

If you are friends with me on facebook, I am sure that you have noticed an explosion of posts about redoing our basement.  It's taken up all of our free time, the rest of the house has been left in absolute shambles (as the normal cleaning doesn't even get done), and thank goodness I have church and young womens as those make me take a shower. (Gross I know, but the truth.)

It all started with a quick run to check out RC Willey.  We like to go there and just walk around, looking at ideas of decorating and furniture we like for the future.  We stopped by carpet... saw a good deal... and bought it on the spot.  (Well, ordered it.  You don't pay for it until they measure to double check how much you need.)

When we bought the house, the basement Living Room was carpet-less.  You can tell there was carpet at one point, but we know they had water issues (and should now be fixed... we haven't had any sign of leakage) so we assume they got rid of the carpet and just never replaced it.  So it's just cement, which is PERFECT flooring for painting the walls.  So when carpet was ordered, we decided that we really should get started on the Living Room as we hadn't even touched it prior.

First we had to move all of our junk out.  It kind of became a place to store things when we moved in, including other peoples furniture.  So we (mostly Derrick) cleared all that out.  I had previously been working on getting all of the wallpaper gone (what a bugger job!!) so I up'd my game on that.  Derrick pulled off all of the wood paneling.  And that was a mess.

They used glue instead of nails (WHY???) and the glue pulled off the dry wall.  And we also found some surprises behind the wood paneling, which made us think was the reason they put it up in the first place.  We found (dead) mold (thank goodness) and two large holes (did they throw someone into the wall??).

While figuring out how to patch these up, fix the dry wall, and what to do next we were called by RC Willey and apparently ran out of our "stalling" time (we were sure trying).  We already lost the original carpet we picked as it had run out, but they replaced it with a higher grade carpet for the same price.  But now they said we needed to order or they wouldn't hold the deal.  So we set a date and it gave us about two weeks left.  Yikes!

So everyday has been filled with putting dry wall mud on the walls in layers, sanding and washing in between, caulking TONS of cracks, priming, and painting.  It was an intense week and we cut out more rooms that we were hoping to do at the same time, but in the end we got it done!  We were priming/painting a layer each night after the kids went to bed and used our last weekend to finish base boards and move all of the furniture upstairs for carpet (we also bought carpet for the bedrooms upstairs).

And since we bought carpet for the bedrooms upstairs, it seemed stupid to not paint that room as well.  It didn't need NEAR as much work, but still had plenty of holes.  Our guess is the previous occupants kept a dart board in there.  We found one in the basement when we moved in and not really anything else explains that many tiny holes in bedroom walls.

Oy what a LOT of work!  But it's definitely worth it now that we can use our downstairs.  I am excited for the toys to mainly stay downstairs now instead of upstairs where every guest can see the mess.  Plus our playroom is downstairs so now our boys can fully utilize it!  I don't have to worry about them and tack strips!  It was hecktic having such a crunch timeline, but knowing us it probably would never get done without a date to be done by.  Here are the pics!

The lovely mural of wallpaper almost gone!

The random mtn dew bottle

What the lovely glue did to our walls!  This wall got hit the worst!

This is patching all of the little holes in the upstairs bedroom... That's so many holes!!

I tried to show just a close up of how many in such a small space.

The worst wall, but now with mud caked on.

And that wall when it's done! (The door covering our water temp thing isn't up yet)

Still working on decor and hiding wires (and should have taken a pic before toys came out) but definitely still an upgrade from that wallpaper mural!

Soon will be white doors, but this shows the trim and gray better.

And the upstairs bedroom!

Had major problems with taking off the tape in this room, so left the ceiling tape until we get around to fixing the paint that tore off.  (So frustrating!!  But at least it won't take long.  Will do this when we pull out the paint again for the last bedroom needing to be painted downstairs.)