Playroom Progress

It's coming along!

And we are so excited about it!!

Craig has been working on finishing a portion of our basement into a playroom for the kids since about the beginning of March. The idea had been in the works for much longer than that and I had hoped it would be completed in the winter time. But it's hard to get this type of work done when you're a full-time dad and we had other little projects that took priority. Craig has actually also been working for his cousin doing construction more regularly since March 7th though and has been squeezing in basement work in the evenings and on weekends.

Right now the kids closet shelves are overflowing with stuff and it feels like so many of their play things don't have a good "home" for storage. I am just itching to completely clean out and reorganize their closets once this new playroom is finished. It will be SOOOO nice to have extra living space and a place that the kids can feel is their own. They have their own bedrooms and are proud of those, but probably only 20% of their play things are within their access. I feel bad about that. Especially with art things because how can they take an interest in something that seems so off limits? When this is done, the kids will have so much more that is easily accessible to them because it can just be left out/set up.

Our basement is kind of embarrassing to show. It's unfinished on both sides and has always been just kind of a hodge podge of storage/laundry/workout/desk... stuff. It's also the guts of the house where our furnace and water heater (and meter) and exposed pipes and sump pump and electrical box are housed. So there's a lot of not-so-pretty stuff down there. But we're working hard to clean up and clear out what we can and to make safe the things that have to stay.

For now, I'll just show you the side where the play room will be. If you come down the stairs from our kitchen, you will come to a small space at the bottom. You can turn left to get to our laundry area (along with a bunch of other crap) or you can turn right to walk through this space and get to the side where our workout stuff used to be. This picture is looking to the right. It looks terrible, I know. The water heater is new - Craig installed that last year in February. The sump pump is also there next to the water heater and brand new as well (since New Years). And the white pole in the foreground is a support beam that Craig put in when we were doing our kitchen. We took up a linoleum floor in the old kitchen and replaced it with about 500 more pounds of ceramic tile. Craig wanted to add this in what appeared to be a questionably weak spot beneath the kitchen to support that extra weight. He put another one behind our furnace in a spot where previous owners must have just cut through floor joists to run heating ducts. We were hearing a squeaky spot in the dining room whenever we walked over that weak spot and he figured out why. EVERY TIME he starts a project, I hear about how careless/stupid previous owners must have been to do some of the things they did. ;) Craig's my regular "Holmes on Homes" DIY'er and he can't stand when something is done wrong. Along that wall where the ply wood is leaning used to be wood shelving that stored a LOT of blue storage tubs (old kids clothes, snowsuits, painting supplies, drywall supplies, etc. etc.). Craig decided that he'd rather have a tool bench/storage area there instead since he'd be doing a lot of work down here. It's also nice to have a designated space for some tools that are used frequently in the house since our garage is detached and that's where most of Craig's stuff is stored. So you can see, he took down all the shelving and shifted it just inside the room beside it.

This picture was taken prior to the one above it when he was rebuilding these shelves. They sit directly across from our furnace and a little extra storage under the steps where our Christmas tree and other Christmas stuff is stored. There's also a rack that we moved from the opposite side of the basement to hold partially used paint cans. Side note: Craig labeled all our paint cans (to be used for touch ups as needed) as "living room trim", "master bath", "Will's room", etc. in case it's not entirely obvious in coming years. :)

Here, he'd just started building his tool counter. The room looks much less dingy with light coming through the window.

So here are some of his most frequent necessities. He picked up the counter for cheap somewhere and eventually he's going to put (latchable?) cabinet doors on the front of the bottom shelf. Also, another project he wants to tackle maybe next winter is to put a tile floor down in this little room. It's never going to be fancy, but it will be presentably functional.

Okay, so turn right out of that room and you come to this side. This picture was taken last summer prior to moving those blue tub shelves. The punching bag on the left is currently on loan to one of my brothers. Will's train table and our treadmill/workout stuff is moved to the other side temporarily and the official entrance to the playroom will begin just past the blue tub shelves (see above for clarification). So essentially, you will walk through a hallway of sorts between the tubs and the furnace to get to the playroom door. We have an indoor/outdoor carpet on the floor of both sides. It's not that old really, but we're getting a new piece for just inside the playroom. The rest will stay. We haven't had water in our basement in a very long time and are pretty confident that there won't be any future floods, but we don't use regular carpet just to be on the safe side.

Here's a picture of the supplies Craig picked up months ago.

Okay, this is a picture of the old ceiling inside the current playroom looking back toward the furnace and shelves. The ceiling is not real high to begin with, but the heating ducts you can see running below it make a few spots of the new ceiling even lower. We have to work around that. Also, you can see two U-shaped pieces of duct work hanging down on the left and right hand sides of this picture. Those send heat up to our living room floor vents and the U is a "trap" for things that may fall down the vent. Well, I don't think those are really used anymore these days and they were going to make putting a ceiling in this room much more difficult. So that was one of Craig's first projects in early March: removing the U and custom-building a straighter piece to work with our old-house set-up.

One of Craig's greatest skills is problem-solving. He can fix anything.

Well, it's not how a newly built home would look, but it was the right solution for our home. He also inserted a mesh screen inside the vent upstairs as an extra precaution for dropped things... intentional or not. Ahem... Sophie! We're onto you!

Here's the room cleared of the stuff it used to house and the door removed that divided the two sides of the basement. The previous owners painted the cinder block walls in the colors of some sports team. This was their workout room too. The bottom half of the walls is like this plastic panel that sticks off about 1.5-2" from the cinder blocks. It's hideous. The new walls will go directly in front of all of that. Craig has started to frame the north wall (on the left here). Another problem he has run into because of it being such an old house is that NOTHING IS SQUARE! He can't assume that all the wall studs can be cut the same. He has to custom measure each one because the house is basically crooked. :) Also, the floor is really funky and not completely level, so it sort of rises up at the edges of the room and makes it very difficult to create a level/square wall.

Ahh... that door. I don't know why, but I'm having such a hard time parting with it. It looks SO OLD and has so much character that I can't look at it without thinking about the man that put it here and what the world looked like then. I keep trying to convince Craig to turn it into a table or something, perhaps for a patio or back porch in our next house? But he and his dad keep telling me it's junk. I know... but I just like it.

Okay, the north wall is framed and he's working on framing the ceiling and around the heating ducts. The ceiling will basically dip down to go around those ducts (the part that looks like a ladder hanging there) - Craig calls that the "bulkhead".

More of the bulkhead.

At this point, we cut the carpet that divides the playroom from the rest, rolled it up and took it out... through the window in the north wall, which leads to our driveway. ;) That's how Craig brought in most of the lumber too.

Framed in! And entrance door hung! From this angle, you can see a little better the space behind the furnace. You can walk back there but it's tight. Next up: electrical.

We were debating between four and six can lights, but went with six to compensate for the bulkhead that divides the span of each light.

Organizing his plan for running electrical wires.

Outlet boxes and wiring.

Insulating.

Hanging drywall on the ceiling first.

Ya, I know. The hubster is lookin' good here. Is it kind of distracting you from the room progress? Me too. He's a pretty handsome fellar in his work clothes, ain't he? :)

Whoops! How'd this one get in here? ;)

He put these vents in the ceiling to put forced air into the playroom so it's warm in there. One sort of in the middle of the room...

...and another close to the entrance. See it up there?

The old doorway that divided the rooms has had drywall board covering the back side into the other room and is now going to be framed in for some built in shelves. I'm so excited about this! Their little table and chairs is going to sit just to the right of these shelves and it will be nice to store some art supplies like paint, colored sand, glitter glue, etc on a higher shelf while still having their coloring books/drawing pads accessable along with stamps, crayons, colored pencils, stickers, etc on a lower shelf.

Finally, all the drywall is hung. Thank you, Wes and Taylor, for your assistance some nights with carrying and hanging the ceiling boards! Craig's showing the kids the progress thus far here. After this, we're going to try to finish it up and surprise them with the completed room.

Now comes the crappy work for a little while. The work that takes hours and hours but doesn't really look like any progress.

A lot of this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

Craig's got to tape all the seams and put a coat of mud over everything, then sand and repeat in some spots. It's been taking longer to dry with this damp, cold weather so Craig brought an extra heater in to help it set.

When that's done, I'll prime and paint everything. Then Craig's going to hang the trim and we'll buy the new section of indoor/outdoor carpet to lay down. And finally, it'll be time to move stuff in and organize! We've got awhile to go I think, but it's progress!

Can't wait to see (and show you) the finished product!

The other side of the basement's going to get a (smaller) facelift as well, though not as fun. We'll be finishing part of it and using it as a nicer workout space. But mostly, I have some cleaning and organizing to do over there to make our basement safe for the kids.