Floored

We bought the low-VOC paint for the walls and there was barely a scent. The floor paint, on the other hand, smelled like a clowder of cats got into the basement, had a hissy fit, and marked every corner. We're sitting around the house this evening a little high, not on pot, but on ammonia-scented fumes.

Anyhow, Justin got two coats of our peacock blue on the floor. The color is a little lighter than I've been imagining but I think it looks pretty striking. We think we'll need to put an extra coat down to get an even saturation and coverage. We're hoping to get the floor done by Friday night so we can spend some time this weekend installing base trim and building out the shelving in these two rooms and moving all of our junk back into the rooms.

Here's the snazzy tool room:

Here's the snazzy storage room:

Ooh la la

The drywall is done; the walls are primed and we are on to the fun part now. Justin and I donned our painting outfits this weekend and broke out the old paintin' tools. Justin rolled and I cut-in and we were able to finish 1.5 rooms and a closet in one day. On the second day, we were a little less productive. Most of the day was spent chasing cracks in the concrete floor with a grinder so we can fill them in with an epoxy and hopefully get a smoother floor to paint. While Justin worked with the epoxy, I wired up all of the outlets in the tool room. Justin installed the trim for the recessed lights and wired up the light in the closet.

This room just needs some concrete patching, some paint on the floor and some baseboard trim and it will be done. The nice cozy gray that we have in our bedroom is on the walls in this room.

On Sunday afternoon, we knocked off some more wall painting: the stairwell and new pantry. We opted to paint the pantry and the wall adjacent to the kitchen the blue that is in the kitchen. Presumably, you'll be able to see this area from within the kitchen and painting it the same color gives a nice continuity.

A rare action shot: me painting.

Here's one tube worth of epoxy in the cracks in our storage room. It looks like we'll be using about 4-5 of these $30 tubes to get this job done.

We will be prepping the floors for paint this next week and hopefully installing base trim soon too. Once these 2 rooms are completed, we are going to be able to move all of our stuff back into the basement!

Walls, Ceilings

A few updates on the new drywall in the house...

The bathroom

Tink's a fan of the new walls (let's hope she doesn't mar them up)

Everything looks a lot smaller than before, when your mind can't extend the room beyond the studs. We're looking forward to getting this phase done. We'll be painting before Christmas.

Toasty Warmth

This basement of ours is looking a lot more like our vision these days. We had the insulators in on Friday and now the basement looks more like a set of rooms, thanks to the opaqueness of the batts. Justin dutifully moved about 2/3rds of our storage up into the extra bedroom and garage to clear the way for the workers. We'll have drywallers in next week so getting this stuff out of their way will help them out.

 Here's our beverage collection. It is nearly a cubic yard of beer, wine and soda. We stockpile. This room literally is hemmed in on all sides now.

 Justin and his dad did a little remediation work on one of the footings for our porch on Friday while the insulation team was in the house. The footing had started to crumble so Justin reused some leftover rebar and formed up a new footing for the column.

 The white insulation helps you imaging what it will look like with walls!

Here's a shot of the storage room all bundled up.