Our basement is officially gutted.
We’re finishing this floor before we start on the kitchen and the bedrooms upstairs. This way, we can escape the remodel disaster zones and maintain slightly more sanity.
Here is the current layout:
And the intended layout:
We’re making some large changes, but we have our reasons 🙂
Reasons 1 & 2: Bedroom-caves
The two rooms down here are pretty useless. They need an egress window to be a legal bedroom.
The plan is to combine the two rooms into one legal bedroom with a gigantic storage closet. Since we’re turning an upstairs bedroom into the master bath, this will keep our bedroom count at 4.
Reason 3: Terrible bathroom
As we talked about in this post, the bathroom has a terrible layout. Actually, the only thing I like about it is the adorably ugly sink.
We’ll be removing the space-eating linen closet, and redoing the resulting 7.5 by 8 foot bathroom.
Reason 4: Utility looking room
We’ve introduced this project, also.
We’ll be covering the pipes and wires when possible, and upgrading the floor.
Reason 5: Wandering layout
The basement is currently split with this short hallway. We’ll be opening the wall up to make the basement feel less cramped and reduce the likelihood of someone getting lost in the maze.
Reason 6: It isn’t pretty
Brick linoleum and paneling is not my idea of a good time.
We started demo in the laundry room. Then we scratched our heads a bit about whether we were starting on the laundry room, the bathroom, or the entire basement. The only thing we used on this floor was our 35 year old dryer and it’s slightly younger pal. We decided to gut the whole floor, and hook the new washer and dryer up in their sad little concrete room full of pipes. At this point, that laundry room is frightful looking.
After making a mess with the laundry room, we realized that step 1 should have been removing all of our stuff. Whoops 🙂 A ton of it is being sold or donated, and we moved everything else upstairs into a spare bedroom. Just emptying out our junk took most of one day. Note to self: have less stuff .
Then we removed bits of the building 🙂 We listed the paneling, carpet, media cabinet and interior doors on Craigslist for free, and it was gone in a weekend. Someone actually paid us $50 for the carpet… even though it was free.
Electrical outlets and plumbing fixtures were donated, and we knocked down the hallway wall and linen closet. The only trash was the carpet pad, some linoleum, broken trim, and the shower.
Voila! Empty(ish) floor.
After Demo came Discover. The best thing was this linoleum hiding coyly under the bathroom floor.
I think I may keep it.
We also found 29 mice skeletons in one wall. That’s not an exaggeration; we counted. They had a lizard buddy hanging out too.
The less fun discoveries include water :{ Water seeps between the floor & concrete block in the laundry room. That seam is easily fixed, but both corners of the basement have seepage through the wall.
The adhesive on the floor looks like a puddle in that pic, but only the concrete bricks are damp. Coincidentally, that’s exactly where the gutters drain to. Our plan is to improve the gutter drainage, which should fix it. We’ll waterproof the interior corners as a back-up.
You guys are amazing – it’s going to look great! I will say I think your bathroom lino is remarkably similar to my kitchen floor – just think gold instead of green!