Basement Reno

For those of you who haven't been to our house since the summer of '06, we have renovated 600 square feet in the basement. We're kicking ourselves for not taking any "before" pictures but we have plenty of "after" pics. I (Justin) started the renovation just after September long weekend and was done a couple days before Christmas. In short form, here's what we did: gutted the whole thing and dug out the front of the house to repair the east foundation wall, re-insulated and drywalled the whole thing, painted, built the bar as you see below, and laid tile on the floor. In the end it turned out exactly as I had pictured it in my mind! Yay!

After all was said and done I had my mom paint some murals on the wall. I was going with the whole sports theme, turned out to be mostly a NASCAR theme, I haven't collected many things from other sports yet but it's definitely a work in progress.

In case you're scratching your head over the two numbers, 41 is Elyse's favorite NASCAR driver Reed Sorenson and 17 is Matt Kenseth. Stay tuned for updates on them.

I had lots of help during the three months we were working since I only had evening and weekends to do it. Jared, Dawson, and Tyrone helped quite a bit with the actual construction, Elyse helped with the drywalling, tile, and paint, Elyse's mom Darlene helped extensively with the tile since she was the only one who really new what they were doing, and my friend Tom did all the electrical. My parents, Dan, Marvin and Dylan also helped. I'm sure there were others and I apologize if I forgot you. Overall, job well done and we are very pleased to have a second floor of living space in our home!