It's been forever since we've bothered doing any kind of home-improvement in the basement. For one thing it's cold down there, and there are spiders. It's also very dungeon-y and daunting considering it was 100% unfinished when we bought the house.
We
re-insulated in winter 2009, threw up two dividing walls in winter
2010, and haven't given the basement entry a second thought since then.
Well we haven't given actually doing work in the basement a second thought, I certainly did a fair amount of thinking about what we were going to do down there in regards to the floor plans, storage, finishings, etc. Some would call it daydreaming, bloggers call it planning.
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| 2009 |
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| 2010 |
After the last couple of projects we've done around here, we knew we couldn't put it off any longer. It's been three years. We needed a coat closet for our entryway. Badly. But before
we could put up any more drywall or doors or anything we had to finish removing the
pell-mell-shanty-town-closet-shelf-thing that was attached to the stairs
when we moved in. I had removed about 2/3 of the sections that
surrounded the other sides of the stairs a few years ago, but the
remainder was serving (poorly) as a coat rack. You're going to have to
take my word for it that it was possibly the saddest excuse for a coat
closet ever because I've never actually taken any pictures of it and
Jesse started demolishing things before I could even think of grabbing
the camera. Just trust me on this, the 'back' of the closet was a fugly old sheet the last owners had put up. Yeah. Super classy.
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| {That fugly sheet right there. That's the one.} |
Not long into the demo we were struck again by how BADLY the last group of people
to work on the house were in need of some sound building advice.
Seriously. So that I don't ramble I'll just say this: the stairs are
floating stairs, so they were fine, but everything else was so not even close to any kind of code or logic I'm shocked any of it stayed up at all. For real. There may have been cursing and desperate cries for the first adult beverage of the day.
So we had to start from scratch.
And gutted everything.
Which
wasn't necessarily a bad thing. None of the existing walls or studs
that we removed were anchored to the floor in any way at all. There was
much laughing and head shaking, because there's nothing you can do but
start from the beginning and do it right. Gutting the area was also a
bonus because it meant we had total freedom customizing the size of the new WIC and the nook I've been hankering for. That's right, a nook. For built-ins. Heck yes.
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| { new baseplates} |
As always a new DIY project is as good an excuse as any to buy a new tool, right? So we picked up our own RamSet kit so we could frame our own basement walls. The RamSet tool works by loading a 22 powder load into the barrel and a fastener into the end. Press against the surface of the
material you wish to secure and hit the top with a hammer. That simple.
It's loud, and sometimes you have to hit it pretty hard, but it's
simple, and I like that it's not a huge bulky machine. Definitely something you could easily move from job site to job site.
After getting all our studs and plates in place we hung a few sheets of drywall
that we had left over from the last project, but didn't get very far
before we packed it in and started making up a list of what we'd need delivered. This is what happens when you don't plan ahead
folks, your motivation gets the better of your flakey personality and
you run out of materials before you run out of steam.
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| {what will be the WIC} |
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| {nook for built-ins} |
Not bad for an evening + afternoon worth of work. Once we get the rest of the drywall up and a door framed in the front entry will actually look a little more like an entry and a little less like a super grim dungeon.
