Downstairs Demolition

When we bought our house it was listed as 4 bedrooms and 1 bath. Two of the bedrooms were pseudo-finished basement rooms. They had windows and closets - so it wasn't a stretch to see them as rooms. In fact one of them served temporarily as an actual bedroom for our friend Michael while he was home-hunting! That being said, Michael has a high tolerance for sketchy living spaces (he was a UW frat boy, after all)!!

This is Michael during the ceiling tear-out preparing for the rewiring.
Here's Nic removing piles of torn out knotty pine - with only the bedroom door left standing.

And the grand finale! The bare room. No door. No walls. No ceiling. No more knotty pine. Kind of sad to see it go. I actually asked hubby to save it - just in case we decide to use it somewhere else in the house (ha!). So half of the basement bedrooms are torn out and plans to rebuild and reconfigure are underway. I'm very excited about the edition of a new bathroom downstairs. We've got some really cool ideas - and we'll post floor plans as soon as we can come to a consensus.

Opening a Can of Worms

So I go away for two weeks for a business trip and while I was gone hubby found a gaping hole in our foundation wall. How does this happen? We've been living in this house for over 10 months and we never noticed a HUGE hole in our basement wall? I'll do my best to explain a) how this happened and b) how my super handy rockstar hubby fixed the problem and fast!

The upper left corner of the picture above is showing the northwest corner of our basement. Yes, it's ugly, but I'm actually getting used to the creepy 'haunted house' looking interior of the basement. Someday it will be finished....

So we before this creepy crawler corner of the house was exposed - it was covered by a large floor to ceiling cabinet that had probably inhabited the space for at least 5o years. When the cabinets were ripped out (by hubby and entourage of awesome and equally handy friends) a massive gaping hole was discovered. The picture below shows the daylight seeping into the basement from the outside. The picture further below shows the basement from the outside. Are you kidding?! It's a miracle that our neighbors' rodent problems didn't become ours.

To fix the gaping hole problem, hubby cut a bunch of 2x4s to fit the gaps. To fix the problem of the wood rotting, hubby dug all of the dirt away from the house (dirt against siding and non-cement exterior walls is bad - fyi). Bad boards!

Lastly, here he is, my hero putting primer on the exterior wall board that will go where the siding had rotted. When we paint the house - no one will ever notice!

Before & After (kitchen vent)

Before
After
Since these pictures were taken the vent covers have been painted to match the rest of the cabinets. I'm still not really sure why we needed to hide the vent (since they were behind closed cabinet doors already...) but VOILA!