Finishing touches

We've been busy in the basement since this summer. Now that things are so finished, we are spending tons of time down in the basement.

I moved my stain glass window from the front window to the back...it is nearly a perfect fit.

Here's our basement living room, all set up with our furniture from upstairs.

Our elegant basement 1/2 bathroom. Marble floor and counter.

Staired and Floored...

It has been a while since the last post to the Bungalow Blog and a lot has happened here on Beacon Hill. At our last check in we were still working on the basement and I am pleased to report that this project still has a modicum of steam behind it. Our upstairs living room furniture has been replaced and relocated to the basement so there are comfortable places to sit on both floors now. We infilled the hardwood floor between the kitchen and the pantry (old closet) as well as replaced the "temporary" OSB stair treads with fir to match the other stairs in the house. We've spent the last week making all this happen and then spent a portion of this weekend putting the finish on. This has been the plan for a while but had the unfortunate timing of happening when the temperature nears 90 degrees here in Seattle. Our basement is easily 20 degrees cooler than it is outside and can currently only be reached through a window. Great timing. 

We've also been enjoying the fruits of our labor outdoors as summer has certainly arrived here. Our cherries have come in and mostly been consumed, our lettuce and beets are still going strong and the recent heat has been doing great things for our tomatoes, beans, squash and cucumbers. Laura has been coming up with creative recipes to use up all of this produce with much success as I'm certainly eating more beet greens than I would if left to my own devices. I've hosted two home brewing sessions and entered the Georgetown Power Tool Drag Races (neighbor Chelsy and I here) to keep myself occupied.

In other news there is a competing blog in Laura's family that is chronicling the construction of her sister Sarah, BIL Ryan and nephew Baxter's new home in Nashville Tennessee. Another Bungalow Blog details how quickly things can happen on a house when you leave it to the professionals.  

Tread installation in progress

Finished landing between pantry and kitchen

Dual sparge tower in use on pre-Father's Day brew session

A big leap on the project front

Justin and I have been busy finishing projects these last few weeks and not blogging much about it so this is going to be a lot of progress in a single post.

In early March, we got busy sanding and painting the doors that we found at Second Use, a local salvage store. This store has been a gold mine for us in the door arena...we really scored some awesome deals. Justin got a good buy from Compton Lumber for building the door frames for these doors and prepping for the door hardware.

Here's the man making sure he has a smooth finish.

These doors really finish the room and hiding all of our storage.

Our future bathroom is to the left and our workshop to the right.

This week, I stayed home from work to host the carpet installers. This took a couple of hours and voila! we had a finished space.

Tink is making herself comfortable. The room was so different with a concrete floor but now looks cozy and complete...minus the furniture.

 Another view. Check out those curves.

This weekend was delightful. We had sunny weather--enough for short sleeves and the first outdoor bicycle ride of the season.  Justin and I spent some quality time cleaning up the yard and filling up the yard waste bin.

 We redid this corner with coniferous shrubs that should be a better fit for the space. The previous plants had outgrown the plot.

The side garden is coming in nicely.

Trimmed out

Justin and I have been doing a lot of basement work over the last few weeks but the work is the kind that is hard to see in photos. Mostly we've been installing baseboard trim, patching scrapes and dents in the walls and getting things ready to add door casing. We took our bargain doors to the lumberyard last week to have frames built and this weekend we installed the frames. Justin picked up 200+ linear feet of door casing which we have been busy painting. Together we painted and installed all of the baseboard trim two weekends ago and I caulked and filled all of the holes. Once we have the rest of the trim up, we can go back around and put a final coat of paint on everything to give it a nice finished look.

In other news, we got a few carpet samples and while we have a general color family (taupe), we haven't found a style we're so keen on yet.

We installed 3 door frames and prepped them with paint. The doors need to be sanded and painted too.

Here's the door casing trim, in the middle of their paint job.

And while I made dinner, Justin cut the countertop for my new desk/crafting station.

Checked off

We've been really busy with the basement these last few weekends. There really hasn't been much play-time despite record snowfalls in the mountains.

Justin and I have been dutifully checking items off the to-do list. We've painted all the walls and ceiling, stored all of our random stuff in permanent locations, installed all of the electrical receptacles and breakers, and laid on the final shiny coat of floor finish. And, we've made a final run to the dump to drop off the final pile of construction debris so Justin can park in the garage.

Our most recent accomplishment is the shiny blue floor; wrapped up on Inauguration Day.

Here's a view from where the washer usually sits. You can see half of our giant beer making storage closet which we also completed in the last few weeks.

Happy New Year

The new year has come and it has brought shelves! This weekend was all about organizing and storing stuff that has been crammed into the nooks and crannies of our spare rooms and garage. We have lots of photos of stuff to share. Here's a little chronology of our long weekend:

• Final coat of polyurethane on the floor
• Trim out storage room; no worries about caulk and paint...it's a storage room.
• Build first two of three shelving units in storage room
• Wipe down and move all of our outdoor/active gear onto these shelves
• Build shelves in closet of tool room and move all paint and adhesives into tool room
• Build workbench in tool room
• Move all of Justin's tools and hardware/supplies into tool room
• Build third shelf in storage room and store the remaining boxes of stuff
• Relocate can light in living room; mud and tape hole
• Paint closet in laundry room
• Build shelving for spare bedroom closet
• Build shelving for new pantry space and move a few goodies into this space

Here are the photos of our efforts:

Oops...we measured wrong. 

New shelves, stocked with all of our stuff and even some room to spare for future expansion. Note the trim and shiny blue floor.

 The tool room, outfit with a new workbench and tools! We still need trim in here but are planning to pre-paint it before nailing it to the wall.

The spare bedroom's new closet shelving. 

Our cool blue pantry with all of my canned goods and cookbooks and assorted beverages. I have a few ideas for how to tart it up a bit.

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.

Amusing myself with cookies

I've had so much fun assembling and decorating my gingerbread replica of our Beacon Hill Bungalow. I've spent most of the day with my hands gooped up with Royal icing and surrounded by cookie crumbs. Here are some photos of my creation.

Front view, complete with our kitties Tink and Pongo in the front yard. I made the porch from chocolate wafer cookies; the columns from candy canes; and the roof of the dormer from chewing gum. The main roof is green-tinted icing with coffee grounds mixed in to give that "composite roof look". 

 Here we are looking south. I took some editorial liberties and didn't build the bump-out for the dining room and planted a tree instead.

 The rear view. Our back porch looks icy and dangerous without a railing.

 From above, with a dusting of snow.

Home sweet home

Grinders

We are down the last item on the to-do list for the basement before we call in the professionals: rough in electrical for accent lights under soffit in living room. Nevermind that we keep finding things to append to the end of the list. Like grinding down the concrete floor so it will be more level and take paint better. And pulling the staples from the ceiling joists.

Justin spent the best parts of black Friday grinding the concrete floor. I spent the best parts cutting out gingerbread pieces to make a miniature replica of our house (more on that later).

 Here's Justin attacking the last 15 sqft of concrete (behind the washer/dryer). He's had a full day of vibrating.

Here's a progress shot--taken at about mid-day. Doesn't the ground side look so fresh and clean? It is really dusty so it's not so clean but it does look fresh!

Next week, we'll be insulating. Er, we'll be paying someone to insulate. And the week after that we'll be paying someone to drywall. It'll be a liveable space soon!

Closing in...

A view of our new soffits looking westward.

Well, we made a decision on the duct. It's staying where it is. That's option #1 from the previous post. I had 3 construction professionals over and they all thought it was too minor to worry about and maybe not worth spending the money. So, we'll have a little cave of a laundry room.

Despite a really lousy forecast for this weekend, it didn't rain much during the days so re-framing the window in the basement bathroom was more enjoyable for Justin than expected. The only hiccup was a finish nail that went through the vinyl frame of the window and pierced a hole in it. We'll have to figure out how to repair vinyl window frames in the spring. For now, some waterproof tape will have to do. Justin also finished framing in the walls in the bathroom and built a few more soffits. 

 

We've modified the exterior with a smaller window, salvaged from the back of the house.

 

For my part, I tinkered with a bit more electrical work and hammered in a big bag of the nail guards to protect the electrical wire from the drywall screws. And I caulked in the new window and killed the tube of caulk filling in some other random holes.

Let's take a look:

 An action show of Justin putting some sheathing up to fill in where the larger window once was.

My soffit man.

A little electrical re-org--no sooner do we get it installed then we rip it apart and redo it. This is the switch to the living area. It used to be on the wall that the storage room shares with this room but I thought it might be a better fit on an adjacent wall, twinned up with the switch (yet to be installed) for the under-soffit lighting.

 Here's our tidy little bathroom, with a new little window. Justin had to notch each one of those studs in 3 places to fit over the plumbing in the wall.