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  1. Quick Update

    March 29, 2012 by Melissa

    I know it’s been a while since I have posted, but we’ve been busy. We did a week-long trip to Las Vegas–>San Francisco–>Napa and Sonoma, which was the perfect March get-a-way. Since we have gotten back we have both been swamped at work and our house has needed some spring cleaning lovin’. The sunshine brings busy weekends to our lives every year. We already have a summer schedule full of weddings, showers and other events. While we are excited to celebrate some of life’s greatest moments, we selfishly want to be at home continuing the progress of our basement. This is why home projects take a long time….life happens. Unless your job is to stay home and fix up your house, it takes time. You have to have patience. We have lived without a finished basement for almost two years, so what is a few more months? Our next step is still to order and install the dry wall. It could be two weeks from now or it could be two months from now. (Hopefully, it is somewhere in-between). It all depends on…life. We won’t have time for major makeover plans such as drywall in a weekend right now, so we on that rare Sunday afternoon that is open in our schedule we are going to mark some of our smaller projects off the list–such as planting peonies in my backyard and painting our master bedroom.

    I thought by living here almost two years, we would have finished a lot more around the house. But it takes time. The most important thing is to enjoy life together, and you don’t want to be stressed out by fixing up your house every weekend. BUT OH will it feel so good when all of the big projects are done! Stick around. :)

    Category Uncategorized | Tags: | No Comments

  2. Installing the Subfloor in the Basement

    March 4, 2012 by Melissa

    We woke up this morning ready to get stuff done. We worked out, made breakfast, drank coffee, and ran off to Home Depot with our Lowe’s coupon in hand.  Recently, we heard that Home Depot takes competitor coupons; therefore, we were able to get 10% of our DriCore subfloor. (We also stopped by and purchased paint for our bedroom from Sherwin Williams. If you have an account with them you get 30% of all paints until Monday 3/5/2012!) We’ve been excited to get work down on the basement since our basement didn’t flood for the first time after a big rain. It rained hard for three days, which normally would have caused a flood. Not even a drop! We still decided that we wanted to put down subfloor, which promotes good indoor air quality by allowing the concrete to “breathe” reducing any possible potential for mold. It also makes the floor warmer since our flooring won’t lay directly on concrete. It’s our extra layer of protection.

    Before you can install subfloor the floor needs to be level. We knew the basement wasn’t level from earlier floodings. The water would be deeper in certain areas, which means your floor is not level. We used Combimix, a self leveling compound. It comes in a bag and you just follow the instructions. (Straight forward enough for ya?) Buy it. Follow the instructions. John added more water than it instructed, because it was easier to work with. Before you put down the subfloor you have to put down a sweeping compound. Sweeping compounds are used to control and eliminate dust and dust particles. The floor must be not only be level but also very clean.

    Between the 10% coupon and Home Depot gift cards from our wedding we only spent $200 on the compound and subfloor. I am not going to do a step-by-step how to on installing the DriCore subfloor because it comes with a brochure and a DVD that is very self-explanatory. It’s extremely easy to do. Just be sure you buy one leveling kit for every 60 panels that you buy. To figure out how many panels you need you take your room square footage divided by 3.3 = the number of panels required. We needed to buy 93. It also says it takes one hour for every 100/square feet.

    DriCore Subfloor panels

    Installation:

    After we finish with the subfloor–which should be about one hour from now–we will order and install the dry wall. We have a few busy weekends coming up so we will not be able to hang the dry wall until April. We will have a few days in March to get work done, but not enough time to install the drywall. We hope to use this time to continue working on the master bedroom. When we first started the basement, we estimated it could take up to 8 months, which would have meant we would be finished by August. I think we could be done by June. EEEEK. I can’t wait to have a finished basement!

     

    Category Basement Makeover | Tags: , , , , | 1 Comment

  3. Mini Guest Room Makeover

    February 23, 2012 by Melissa

    Since we are in the middle of a major basement renovation (and I doing minor updates to our master bedroom) I was trying to ignore our “overflow” guest room. What is an overflow guest room? The overflow guest room is our back up guest room in the event that our main guest room is occupied with guest. The overflow guest room’s main purpose is to store my clothes and a place for me to get ready.  When we started our basement renovation, the junk took over the main guest room, which meant when we have company in town they stay in my own dressing room. The room itself is crowded. It holds a queen size bed, a Pax Wardrobe, a vanity, and a chest of drawers. ALL in a 10 X 11 room. FUN.

     

    Before

    My only mission was to make sure everything would fit. A difficult task when you can’t even get a picture of the small room.

    Progress

    Everything did fit, but oh did I hate it. Everything is so crammed in there. The Pottery Barn comforter I had was too large and busy for the small space. Here is another angle of my chest of drawers and makeup vanity…

    Um...Progress?

    John had always said who cares about the room, you are only in there for  less than an hour every day. My thoughts are that I have to spend an entire hour in there everyday! If I don’t like being there for an hour, how have our guest felt about spending an entire weekend in there? It’s bad enough that I have to peak my head in the door and ask if they could find my other slipper. Cramped city. Despite all this, I put the project off, because we have enough going on in the house. (I TRY not to get project ADD). I did take the time to switch out the pottery barn comforter with the yellow and gray bedding that I already had.

     

    Much better progress...

    I already liked it better and it cost $0 since I had everything. I examined the room….I was pleased, but I knew it still needed new blinds, art work and a coat of paint. Even with those improvements the cramped space would not be solved, which seriously aggravated me. I always thought “it is what it is”…there is nothing we could do.

    But this past Tuesday morning while I was getting ready, I spilled a glass of water on my makeup vanity. I cursed as I wiped everything down watching the minutes tick as I made myself late for work. Accidents happen, but a little less chaos in my room could have prevented this.

    At 5:00pm I walked in my house (gave Gus some love and attention) and walked upstairs–  cleared everything out and moved it all around. I didn’t even think twice about it. I didn’t wait for John to get home to help me. I was tired of room’s layout.

    More Progress

    Placing the antique vanity in the corner opened up the room. Yes, there is still a lot of stuff in the room but it is an improvement.

    I also still need to:

    • Paint the Walls
    • Frame prints that I got for $10
    • Get new blinds and possibly drapes
    • Make or buy a headboard.
    • Add new fabric to vanity chair

    If I have learned one thing at all from living in our duplex, it is that it takes a long time to get your home the way you want it to be.  We have been there for almost two years and I just started updating our bedrooms. Granted we have done some major construction on the home, but I am now finding time during the week to take care of the little details around the house and on the weekends I work in the basement as needed. Also, this week I found time to shop for new drapes and lamps for our master bedroom. John has to work this weekend but we are going to try to get more work done in the basement.

    Category Bedroom Makeovers, Decor ideas, Decorating | Tags: , , , | No Comments

  4. If Our Walls Could Talk

    February 20, 2012 by Melissa

    We took a break this past week from the basement and blogging so that we could celebrate Valentine’s Day and my birthday as well. If you read my last post, you know that we had our second annual grilled cheese party on Valentine’s Day. We had a fantastic bottle of wine and THE BEST grilled cheese I have ever had. I also ate six mini cupcakes and a lot of chocolate. I am not even close to kidding.

    Presenting the best grilled cheese that ever was…

    There were two kinds of cheese on fresh bread with prosciutto and tomatoes. I love that we started our own tradition on Valentine’s Day, and I plan to do it every year for the rest of our lives. Although, I cannot wait another year to eat this fabulous grilled cheese again.

    This past weekend was the first weekend in a while that we stayed home on Saturday and didn’t step a foot into our basement. It did feel good to take a break, but most of the day we watched DIY and HGTV which made me anxious to get the basement finished. On Sunday I resumed to the regular house chores and John took down the rest of the wooden paneling.

    Mid way through the banging on the walls, John appears with a brown bag full of thousands of…coupons. He found them hidden in the ceiling. WHY was it not dollars?!

    Pictured above is a sampling of the coupons that John discovered. Also there are tons of tickets from a Dec 1980 horse race, which I need to look into.

    I came to the conclusion that someone in that house was a gambler and someone was a saver. We are both curious as to why they would hide the coupons in the ceiling. Maybe they figured if they hit hard times they had coupons to get them through. I am not sure what we should do with the coupons. We could sell them on Ebay.  Or we could use them, since the old manufacture coupons don’t expire. Although, some of the products don’t exist anymore. I could bring them to Pawn Stars when we visit Vegas next month, which would be the most fun option. We probably would get $5 for them, but it would be fun. I need to look into it a little more, but if you have any ideas, please let us know!

    On a side note when we were demoing our bathroom we found a 1950s beer can and coke can. It seems as if our walls really can talk.

     

     

     

    Category Basement Makeover, Life | Tags: , | 2 Comments

  5. Our Valentine’s Day Plans (And a basement update)

    February 13, 2012 by Melissa

    You appreciate home so much when you travel for work. I got back from Dayton, OH on Saturday and it took about two minutes for me to put on sweat pants, order food and turn on a movie. I missed my little family so much, and I was only gone for three days. It felt good to be home on Saturday.  Sunday was a different story. We hauled in 6 large panels of fire treated plywood to hang in the laundry/tool room–so that we can hang tools and other items in there soon. I ended up getting one splinter and smashed two of my little digits. I couldn’t find my gloves and figured I’d be fine. Luckily, it wasn’t too bad. The rest of the day we moved everything out of the main living area of the basement and put it in the laundry room. The main basement is now empty!

    These pictures are *almost* embarrassing to post. But you need to post the ugly stuff to appreciate the “after” photos.

    Before we moved everything out

    You can  see that one corner of the basement still has the original wooden paneling up. We haven’t been able to remove it yet because of all the stuff in the basement. Now that the flooring is finished in the laundry room, we could store everything in there. I didn’t take a picture of what the basement looked like after we moved everything out, but imagine it looking like an empty room.  ;) Progress photos are boring, but the stories that happen throughout the “during” phases are far from boring. Nothing hardly ever goes over smoothly. You are either running to Home Depot every hour to get items that you didn’t think you needed before or there are days like yesterday where you work in silence because the task at hand just plain sucks. No one wants to spend their Sunday moving everything out of one room to another, just to one day soon move it back. It’s not fun. I admit I was tired and cranky from traveling. After weeks of working you start to get a little resentful of working in a dark cold basement instead of getting your typical weekly chores done then relaxing. But we made a committment together to get our basement done, and it is a lot easier to enjoy working together than being miserable. For the most part we work well together, but those infrequent miserable moments are inevitable. If you’re considering making over your home you need to realize that sometimes it sucks!  (Did I mentioned Sunday afternoon sucked?) The first part of the day John and I were getting on each others nerves. I would move something into the laundry room and he would move it again. (Seriously?!) I also felt annoyed that I had to come home to cleaning up the basement. I felt sorry for myself that I didn’t get a weekend.

    When it was over, I took a hot shower, put on my favorite pair of sweats, ordered pizza, poured a glass of wine and sat on the couch under a mass of blankets with my husband and dog.  It was wonderful. I didn’t feel annoyed or resentful anymore. I felt grateful that we had gotten so much accomplished on Sunday so that we didn’t have to work this weekend when it was my birthday. I felt good that we could order take out all weekend and stay home with one another and be happy together despite a few hours of hauling heavy items. We both felt badly for being inpatient with one another, but it only took a few minutes for us to turn a bad day into a good evening together.

    I will use tonight to catch up on our other home chores. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and we will be holding our second annual grilled cheese party at our house. It’s just the two of us, five different kinds of cheese and some yummy bread and butter. Instead of sitting in a crowded restaurant with Valentine’s Day special and hundreds of other couples, we will be whipping up a variety of grilled cheese and housing them in the comfort of our own house. We work so hard on it, we might as well spend time there. Plus, it will be just the two of us.

    Category Basement Makeover, Life | Tags: , | No Comments

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