The Basement Remodel

So I've meant to keep everyone posted on our remodel of the basement through weekly pictures. unfortunately with Holly traveling a lot lately the camera found it's way with her and so most of the pictures I have are on a cell phone I have no idea how to download. Yet, I do have some pictures. Just so everyone is on the same page, the basement was somewhat finished. If you call slapping some drywall up to 2x4s and painting concrete walls red a finished basement. It was extremely cold in even the hottest months and the kids had no desire to be down there. This left us with 700 unused square feet of house.














Our good friends and neighbors across the street who share the same floor plan got the ball rolling when Ryan finished his basement after 4 yrs and I must say he did an outstanding job. Ryan really knows what he's doing and took time to put a lot of detail in his work. His results really inspired our build. Here are some photos of his basement before the finishing touches.





















Since in use our neighbors say the spend a majority of the time downstairs now and the rest of the house is uncluttered and kept a bit cleaner. This sounded very appealing to us so we resolved to do likewise with our basement. I figured I'd watched enough of the DIY network to do the project myself and with my days off I could easily be done in less time than Ryan. Well if the tools I used for the demo was an indication of my skill level then I was terribly wrong. I have no tools. I ended up pulling trim and drywall off with a pink hammer that came as a Mary Kay gift for my wife and 2 chisels my mother-in-law brought over. That and a borrowed reciprocating saw I was able to do 90% of the demo.




























At this time I quickly figured out that I wasn't going to have the time nor the ability to do a job that was 1/8th to what my neighbor Ryan had done so we went to a family friend who is a General Contractor. Our needs for this project were a place that kids and parents migrated to. We wanted to turn the old room that house the 30 boa constrictors at one time into an office for Holly. One week later Jack and his partner Ron were finishing up the cleanup and knocking down walls.



First order of business was the HVAC system. We needed two extra vents ran to make one in Holly's office and 3 in the remainder of the basement. When the guys were in doing the duct work they found a large hole in the return that was sucking cold air in, causing the furnace to believe it was colder than it really was. Problem now solved and by widening the main ducting coming off of the furnace by 2 inches they were able to put two vents in the main seating area of the living room and one in the kids knook while still being able to add one in the office.














You can see in the above photo that the wall that followed the stairs out has been halved. As you come down the stairs to the right is the door leading into the office/spare bedroom. Originally, this wall went the length of the basement and was literally a junk room of Mary Kay stuff while the office was used to house my snakes. The wall was taken out and in it's place we planed to have a kids knook with a built in bookshelf and bench/toy chest for the kids. The wall with the two white doors is our main screen wall. It will house 3 in-wall speakers and a 92" diagonal screen that measures about 102" in width. Behind it is some storage along with the furnace and water heater. The right door will be framed off and eventually a bathroom will be added, but probably not with this build.

I must apologizes at this point because most of the build pictures are on my phone which I've yet to down load. So we'll skip two weeks to where we are today. Framing went up, electrician came in and hung 9 recessed cans along with a slew of outlets, and the insulation was added. My part in all this was the theater portion. Iwant this to be a place we can gather as a family and watch some movies together as it's hard getting all 5 of us out and about. Plus, come college football season I want to seem like I'm on the field with the Texas Longhorns. So I opted for some real nice Polk Audio in-wall speakers and built enclosures for them to optimize the sound. You can see how they are mounted flush with the walls and only the painted screens will be visible once it's all said and done. We upgraded the reciever and now have the PS3 for bluray. We will be getting a screen that is acoustically transparent. Basically it's micro perforated to allow the audio to pass through from the front speakers so things will seem like thier jumping out of the screen. A 500 watt HSU subwoofer next to the seats and a Panasonic AE3000U 1080p LCD projector rounds out the media.

This is the entrance to the downstairs. we opted to take the door out and move it to the base of the stairway. This gives a more inviting feeling to me and mimics the upstairs.



















Here is the new doorway and Jack our general contractor.



















Where Jack is standing, Holly's office is just behind him














I'll post more tomorrow.