Sunday, January 15, 2012

Amazing Framing Progress, 1/14 and 1/15

Thanks SOOOO much to some wonderful friends that helped this weekend, Chris, Garrick, Chris H., and Russ!!!! So much progress was made!!!!

This is the rest of the master bedroom closet. A lot of planning was also done, including determining how to best handle soundproofing the wall that borders the utility area.

This is the rest of the wall that borders the utility area.


A double wall was built to help with the wall - there will be air between the two walls to help with sound reduction, so that the HVAC equipment will not be as audible.

This is on the other side of the basement near the family room, kitchen, and pantry. The area behind the wall on the right side is the pantry area.

This is beyond that wall in the pantry area.

This shows the door out of the apartment that leads to the stairs up to the rest of the house.

Here you can see the basement stairs and the (same) door that will lead to the apartment.

The lumber pile is getting much smaller!!!!!

Here is the lumber pile, before . . .

Floor Plan

This might make sense of some of the other pictures. I know it's hard to tell where everything is!

This shows the full basement. The gray areas will remain unfinished.


Here I have labeled all of the areas of the apartment to be finished.

Sunday, January 8, 2012

All caught up and making progress!

This is my fourth post of the night and I think I have caught up with blogging about most of what has been done so far. I posted the before pics, about the plumbing, and the egress window.

This weekend Marc finished a bunch of framing on this side wall and around the corner, framing out the egress window, and finishing up some other projects. We talked about all that has to be done and did a rough estimate of the time it should take. We are feeling encouraged about continuing to make progress on this again!

The egress window is in the bedroom.

This shows the master bedroom and closet area - the egress window is just to the left of this.

Egress window

This was done on October 4th, 2011. Ryan was pretty excited and hated to go to school that morning!

A happy contractor??


They made this all look REALLY easy!


Initial plumbing

Just a quick post to show the plumbing work that was done for the bathroom. This was done in August 2011. We hired a plumber for this as the township requires it to be done by a master plumber.

The pump was placed under the stairs.



Catching up . . .

Since the last time I posted, a handful of things have gotten done and work is being done again!

First, here are the before pics, though there was some framing around the patio door by the time these were taken.

This shows the utility area that will remain unfinished. A wall will go up in front of this.


This area will be the master bedroom and closet, including the washer and dryer.

Patio door leading to stairs that go to the backyard. There will be a living room/entry area there.

This area will be the kitchen, and across from it will be a family room and eating area.

Ok, those are the before pics. I will post with a few more updates soon!

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Going Green!


Our 4 year old son Ryan LOVES green. This doesn't just mean that he will choose green if asked his favorite color. This means that he might like green more than trains or diggers (though maybe not more than riding his bike), and that is a lot!

This dresser was part of my baby furniture, and it's been in the basement of a few different houses since then. With the basement project going on, we needed to move it and I came up with the idea of painting it and using it in Ryan's room. His bed is a honey color and he didn't have any other furniture in his room, so the natural choice was GREEN! When we initially painted his room we had added a lower bar/shelf to his closet to make it very functional for clothes storage, so we avoided buying new furniture at the time. This was working well, but lately there have been messy piles of shorts and pants in there, and it's been driving me crazy!

Ryan helped me with every step of this project except for using paint thinner to clean the wood. Our local home warehouse store had suggested sanding, but a paint store we love recommended using paint thinner and primer instead of sanding! YAY for that!!! It cleaned the wood well enough for the paint to bond by ensuring that no polish or oils were left behind.


Ryan took off all of the old hardware himself!! All 20 screws. He was thrilled.



We wanted to center the handles on the knobs, so we filled and sanded the existing holes on 4 of the 5 drawers.


Working with Ryan was so much fun! He has a great attention span and listened well! We did one coat of primer (tinted to match) and 2 coats of the semi-gloss paint (skipped the 3rd coat on the drawers) . Ryan painted all 5 drawer fronts and the bottom and side of the dresser twice. I did the 3rd coat on the dresser myself. Not too bad!! We loved doing this project together and I am looking forward to having him help with more things soon!


Opening the paint can was lots of fun!



We are thrilled with the results! Ryan loves the color and he loved picking out what would go in each drawer. This project inspired me to do a few other things in his room too (with more planned!). I finally hung the alphabet letters he made at preschool this past year, which adds a lot to the room. It was a miracle that I found all 26! When I first put them up, I had all but 1. Want to guess which one as missing for a while? I had always loved the letter cards from Land of Nod but Ryan is really proud of having made these and I think they look pretty cute! They don't show up too well in this picture but each one is decorated based on the letter: feathers on the "F," eyes and eight legs on the "O," etc.



Now I have to move his name letters that were previously centered over his bed. I was thinking about painting a shape on the wall for them, but now I might put them on a decorated board or frame to make hanging them easier. You can see 2 magnetic chalkboard squares propped up against the wall - we have to hang them - we have 9 to make a blue/green checkerboard pattern. We color-matched the paint for his dresser to go with that, and his closet is painted a similar color. Sadly we weren't aware of his green obsession when we painted his walls blue!



Before and After!!