Finishing the basement

Last March I wrote about how we built a storage closet in our basement. And by “we” I certainly mean my husband and my father because they are the handy men in my life. We’ve had plans to finish our basement since before we moved in. We specifically did not spend the $20,000 to have the builders finish our basement because that is OUTRAGEOUS and we know it doesn’t cost that much to finish a basement. Plus, if we do it ourselves we can do it the way we want. For instance, the storage closet. None of the builder finished basements have any real storage and for us that’s a big deal. Where would I put all of our holiday decorations? No freaking clue for real.

Anyway….so we’re finally at the point that we’re finishing the rest of the basement. We haven’t really been in a rush because we didn’t really need the extra space but then we found out we were pregnant and there was a sudden fire under our behinds! We only have a 3 bedroom house and one bedroom is a guest room which we don’t really want to lose. And the other room is our office, which we need but we don’t exactly need it upstairs taking up a bedroom. So we’re moving our office to the basement….which means we need a basement that is finished!

Steve started out by framing the entire basement a few months ago. They had some downtime from work and we had the wood just piled up in our basement so he framed us up. Which made me happy because that meant that wood was moved from being just a pile in the middle of our basement haha!

And then work got busy, we got busy, and life got in the way. But recently, my dad came over on one of their random days off and was all “ok let’s go get us some drywall!” And so they did. And then they only did the ceiling and my dad was like “ok, you guys have fun finishing this up this weekend and I’ll be back next week.”

Drywall work is really hard on his body and it wasn’t until after I had done some of it that I realized how hard it was on the body so I was so, so grateful that he’d gotten the ceiling done because I have a feeling that the ceiling is WAY harder than the walls are.

It was taking the two of us a LONG time to get all that done and a couple of our bad ass friends offered to come help us and we very, very gratefully took them up on their offer.

It made the entire thing go SO much faster – what would have literally taken us an entire day only took a few hours with their help. SUCH BIG HELP! And it was more fun to work as a group.

They’re so awesome that they volunteered to come back over when we got the rest of the drywall (for the other half of the basement) to help us with that. And that half is bigger! Seriously, we have some awesome friends.

Even Buddy wanted to help with the drywall, but he really wasn't that big of a help. He sure did try though haha!

Since we got everything hung my dad and Steve have been working on the tape, mudding, and sanding part. I can’t really help with that because I don’t know the first thing about taping or mudding and Steve didn’t want me really in the basement at all when they were sanding so I haven’t been much help since we got it all put up.

Right now, half of our basement is finished minus the paint and the door handles but we’ll actually get all that stuff done when we finish the other half…. In the next couple weeks. Our goal is to have the rest of the drywall hung by July 14th. So the plan is that by the end of July we’ll have a completely finished basement so we can move the office and start the nursery. We'll see how that works out for us between Steve's work schedule and his baseball schedule it could be pretty tight but we're hopeful nonetheless.   We’ve got a busy summer in front of us, but I’m pretty excited to have this finally done.