Saturday, November 21, 2009

Basement Before & After

I promised updated photos of our basement remodel, and here they are. We chose to remodel the basement before any other room in our newly purchased home once we had moved in. The reason: it smelled horrible. I don't just mean horrible, it was rancid. It was so bad, the basement remodel went from being at the bottom of our to-do list, to the very top.

As a refresher, here's the basement before shots:



Basement After:






What a huge difference! We used to dread trudging down to the basement, holding our breath and trying not to touch anything disgusting, but after our renovation it's turned into our favorite place in the house. Here's a breakdown of what we did for this transformation:


The carpet had to go, and fast. We ripped that baby up stat, quickly realizing that it was glued down to old vinyl tiles that started coming up as well.
We ended up ripping out the old vinyl tiles underneath the carpet, which was definitely a chore.
Halfway through ripping out the tiles, we realized they were asbestos. OOPS!
In this photo (before we realized the tiles contained asbestos fibers), you can see all the dust from the tiles we are breaking up floating about in the air....

So then we decked ourselves out in uber-cool gas masks and began and completed Operation Asbestos Contamination.
After treating our basement like a biohazard zone for several weeks, and being super sure we cleaned up every piece of asbestos tile and dust in the basement, it was time for the next stage: paint!


We decided to paint all the wood wainscotting white, which took 3 coats of paint - with paintbrushes. That only took several weeks - but we think the results are well worth it! We decided to go with a neutral brown for the walls.




Then it was time to have the carpet installed (by Lowe's), and then we began the long process of applying and grouting neutral peel-and-stick vinyl tiles. It took awhile (especially cutting around the curved bar!), but we love the tiles are the bar now, it really helps to create zones in the large basement room.

After drywalling and purchasing some pieces of furniture, the basement remodel is almost complete. We absolutely LOVE it! Although not finished, I still have some tweaking and decorating to do, and we are planning on installing new lighting, refinishing the barstools, mosaic tiling all the bar top and installing doors on the wall cabinets behind the bar. All that will come in good time, though... right now our attention is focused on the kitchen and guest bathroom. Unfortunately we have a bad habit of taking on far too many projects at once. Or maybe that's a good thing?

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your so cool post,it is useful,i love it very much.please share with us more good articles.

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