Insert closet-related joke here

Well, I was trying to make it an even three months, but I just couldn't go another day without posting. No, really. My dad threatened me with actual, physical harm if I didn't post something. And given that he always used to be able to smack me in the head from the front seat, even when I was sitting in the very back of the Land Cruiser, I decided not to test the true length of his reach, and just post.

So, let's see, where did I leave off? Um. Wow. That long? Huh.

Well, how about we tackle the big question first, the one that everyone asks me when they notice I haven't updated the blog in ... gulp ... eighty-four freaking days:

"Are you guys done yet?"

And I'll give you the same answer I've given them for the last 84 days, "No, it's gonna be another two weeks."


First things first: we did manage to finish the floor in the laundry room, and let me tell you, those vinyl planks are great. They look good, they're easy to install, they're cheap, and they're easy to clean:



That looks pretty damn spiffy to me.

The next project was to rebuild the closet under the stairs. Actually, the next project was to add some structure to the stairs before they bent too much farther out of plumb, and THEN rebuild the closet.

So here's the first stage of the structure we added; a brace along the left side of the closet to hold everything steady - we had no illusions about being able to bring it back to plumb:



The next step was to add some bracing so I'd have something to hang the drywall on, and some extra supports for the landing:



Take a closer look at that one, especially the bracing on the left, if you want an idea of just how far out of plumb the stairs were. Oh hell, just check it out from the other side:



And here's the bracing (after some rather extensive modifications to the existing crap) on the side by the workshop:



And here it is with my solo contribution, the hanging of the drywall:



Before we get to the next picture, I feel obliged to point out that I had almost nothing to do with it. All I did was try not to make TOO much of a mess hanging the drywall. All of the mudding and sanding (and I do mean ALL of it) was done by the War Department. I tried like hell to talk her out of it and convince her to call Tony to come back and do it for us, but she wanted to do it herself, and damn me if she didn't do a hell of a good job:





I did help with the trim and painting, but the really good work there is all hers. It's also hard to see behind the cat boxes, but we also completely walled in the alcove under the stairs and painted it over to match the color in the stairwell.

Right, so that's where we stand. Next step is to figure out a door of some kind (we have an old closet door we were hoping to reuse, but once again, I failed to anticipate that, and didn't build the opening to suit it which means we'll have to either come up with a different solution, or do some nifty modifications to the door or frame).

We also need to do the ceiling in the laundry room, but that's more a long term thing. We've burned through the entirety of our renovation budget (and then some) and the ceiling isn't a high priority right now, unlike getting the garage sorted out, and repainting some of the outside trim before the summer gets here.

So, next time (and I promise it won't be long), I'll put up some pictures of the finished bathroom and office, but I did want to show one thing before I sign off.

We had some serious snow back in December, and it afforded us with a crystal clear illustration of what all our hard work has accomplished. Here, take a look at this, and then I'll explain what you're looking at:




That's the back wall of our house during the worst of the snow - we got about 25-30 centimeters, quite a lot for Victoria. Anyway, if you look closely at that picture you can tell where the wall of my office ends and the wall of the laundry room begins. You see, we haven't insulated the laundry room yet, so we're spending quite a bit of money and energy to heat the walls, which is dissipated out into the snow outside, melting it away from the brick. In my office, however, all that time and effort we put into framing and insulating the space is paying off: the heat is staying on the inside, where it belongs.
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What's this? An update? It can't be!

And yet, here you are. Reading this. Huzzah!

Okay, I really have no excuse as to why I haven't made a proper post since... oh my jebus. October?! Really? Wow. I really suck at this whole blogging thing.

Still, there's no time like the present, so how about I fill you in on all the things we HAVE been doing, and pay a little less attention to ... um ... the stuff I haven't? I mean, in my defence, we've been really busy with things like work, and family visits, and - yes - working on the basement. We've also cleaned the gutters, raked the leaves, moved a metric shit-ton of stuff in from the garage, and even found time to argue about whether we should get another cat or not. (No. No, we should not.)

But you didn't come here to read about the standard trials and tribulations of owning a house - you came here to read about how much it sucks to do your own basement reno! And in that regard, my friends, I can definitely help you out.

So... where were we? Ah, right... we had painted the floor in the workshop, got the carpets installed, and we passed final occupancy. (Have I really not posted since the CARPETS went in? Good lord....) Well, once the inspector had gone, it was time to install the floor in the laundry room. To be honest, I wasn't exactly planning on doing this until the new year, but the Top Brass are coming for Christmas, and we kinda wanted to be able to show off a "finished" (or, as we decided, "damn close to finished") when they arrive.

So we started by moving all the enormous, heavy machines out of the laundry room and washing down the floor. As a quick reminder of what our laundry room floor looked like at that stage, voila:



I believe the term for that is "fugly". At any rate, we certainly wanted to cover that abomination up as quickly as we could. Of course, like EVERYTHING in the damn basement, covering it up was a lot harder than I had expected. Oh, and it involved Tapcons, too! Joy!

I suppose that, given the alternative, it went a lot more smoothly and with less ouches than tongue and groove plywood would have, but it was still a largely unpleasant task. Most of the pieces were too large to cut on the little table saw and, as winter's here, the rains precluded setting up the big table saw in the driveway. So the jig was pressed into overtime service to cut all the panels and get them laid out.

A little note here for anyone thinking of doing DriCore (or, as in our case, Sub-Flor) in their basement as I don't think I'll do a whole "Is It Worth It Post" on that alone: make sure your floor is as level as possible. I'm not kidding. This stuff really wasn't made to go over a wavy-ass floor like ours and the levelling kits don't really work for shit. But we weren't about to spend the time, money, and effort to rent a concrete scraper and take up the top layer of concrete so we could lay down a layer of Portland Cement to level the floor. I know, I know, Mike Holmes would not approve, but then Mike Holmes probably wouldn't use this crap anyway.

Anyway, here's what it looked like after about four hours of laying SubFlor:



Yeah. I got a little faster as I went along, but not much. All told, given a couple of breaks, a few sick days, and the occasional more pressing concern, it took us a good three weeks or so to get all the panels down. Oh, and we also completely rebuilt, restructured, and redesigned the cupboard under the stairs. My material estimates were pretty good though - I was only short by two panels. Here's a couple more shots of in progress and the final product and new closet:









Looks pretty damn spiffy, eh? No? Well, we agree. Looked like crap, and had an unpleasantly splintery texture (especially in socks). So it was back off to the Home Despot/Rona to see what would could use to cover over it. The War Department had seen these neat vinyl planks that looked like hardwood in a restaurant, and she thought they would look good in our place. Well, like everything else in this project, we couldn't find them anywhere... oops. Sorry - I meant to say we actually found exactly the ones we had in mind, and they were very reasonably priced. (Yeah, it scared me a little too. I mean, that's just weird.)

Fortunately, the vinyl planks only took three days, but, seriously, what a TOUGH three days they were. My knees, back, hands, and neck were absolutely killing me by the time I finished.

Totally, totally, TOTALLY worth it. Damn, that is a fine looking floor... sad that I'm not going to post any pictures of it. No, really - it's all taped up for painting, and has cables and lights, and cardboard strewn across it. I'll wait until it's cleaned up a bit. Well, fine, one of the floor in progress, just so you can see what the vinyl planks look like and how much cleaner they look than the Sub-Flor tiles:



Anyway, I know I promised some shots of the finished bathroom, and maybe even some of my office with the furniture in place, but I'm missing the final episode of Canada's Worst Driver. So, nyaah.

More later.




For reals this time.




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Winding down the reno

Yes, it's true, we're starting to actually finish things. For instance, we've already started bringing in the stuff from the garage and putting it into my office. Which, of course, turns out to be another one of those hidden renovation costs that they always forget to tell you about on the home renovation channel.

You see, when you spend more than a year of your life doing a renovation, and blow through enough money to buy a new car (not including the money you may or may not have spent on a new car), when the time comes to move back into those lovingly renovated rooms, your old crap that you stashed away a year ago starts looking pretty damn ratty sitting on that nice new carpet, next to the carefully painted walls.

So, of course, we find ourselves having to buy some new furniture...

Anyway, I'm saving the "after" pictures of the office until I get all of the furniture and artwork in place, so this won't be an especially graphic-intensive post. I do have some pictures, however, so let's get this party started.

One of the pictures I didn't post last time was this puppy here:



That's all of the SubFlor (aka Dri-Core) panels we need to do the laundry room. Yes, they ARE just stacked in the workshop for now. We wanted to save them for the weekend my brother was in town - ssssh! He doesn't know this is going to be a working vacation yet! Hee hee hee!

Oh, and note how spiffy that freshly-painted floor looks. That paint turned out really nice. You know, once we did four separate coats (two overall, but we had to do the room in two goes).





Anyway, that's about where things are. Oh, and I wanted to take a picture of how awesome the grass looks in those patches we seeded three weeks ago... but I forgot, and now it's dark. Instead, I'll leave you with another shot of the awesomeness that is my office carpet:



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Wanna see something cool?

Carpets!



Woo!

Yeah, there's a lot more to come, but I felt I should at least post SOMETHING.



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A little more of that old in-and-out

Inside and outside, that is, as we tried to take advantage of the non-inclement weather this past weekend to button up the landscaping (read: massive holes in the ground) before winter, and hurried to get the workshop cleaned up a little before the carpets/laundry room floor go in.

Of course, the War Department was not content with just doing OUR landscaping, but insisted that we also help the Maker Of Pies and her hell-dog do their lawn as well. As it turned out, this was a good idea because once we got done helping Maker Of Pies' husband (Mr. Awesome) with their house, he came over and helped us with ours. As you'll see, this was a good trade for us...

The day began with a large truck backing into our driveway and dumping three yards of "lawn mix" (sand and topsoil) in the driveway. Fifteen minutes later, the truck was back with another three yards of topsoil:



Mmmm... dirty.

We promptly left it sitting there and went over to help Mr. Awesome with his place, hoping that the rain would hold off for at least a while so we wouldn't have to shovel mud when we got back.

It only took the three of us (the Maker of Pies had the plague or something so she couldn't help out) a couple of hours to grade, seed, roll, and fertilize their lawn, so we were standing in front of our twin mounds of hard labor by one o'clock.

And that's when the real fun started.

Before:
Just in case you've forgotten what the fruits of our previous labors have done to the outside of our house, I took a few pictures...

Here's the rather sizable depression in the back yard where we hauled away all the extra dirt that was left over from digging out the perimeter drain:





Also in those pictures (but impossible to see) is the trench we dug for the electrical line out to the garage that sunk down over the past year. It's quite narrow, less than six inches, but could be treacherous when racing out there in sandals to disentangle the cat from the lawn furniture again.

In the front yard, we had the remnants of my all time favorite hole:



As seen from the street, with the big bare swath over top of where we laid the new water service line:



After:
So, with Mr. Awesome's invaluable assistance, we got started shoveling, wheeling, spreading, seeding, raking, and hurting. In a surprisingly short amount of time, the driveway was clear:



The backyard was filled in:





And the front hole was topped off and a scattering of lawn mix laid down over the whole yard:





In case you were wondering, the brown patches are peat moss that the War Department laid over top of the grass seed so it wouldn't blow away. She claims it works, and when it comes to outside stuff, I know better than to argue with her. (Yes, it could be said that I should know better than to argue with her about the inside stuff, too, but where's the fun in that?)

All in all, it went amazingly smoothly, and it's quite the relief to get that finished up before the really bad weather comes. Pretty much the only complaint I had with the whole day (aside from needing THREE vitamin I before bed) was the outside supervisor:



NOT the sort of thing you want glaring down at you when loading a wheelbarrow with yet another load of dirt, I have to say... the inside guy is much more laid back.

Speaking of the inside, we have a hard deadline for prepping the office floors and we're going out of town this weekend, so we decided to start another project that would entail moving everything out of the workshop and storing it in the office where the carpet is going to go.

Yeah, it didn't make any more sense when I was typing it than it does reading it over again now...

Anyway, here's the pictures to explain.

Before before
This is what the workshop looks like (from both ends) most of the time:





Yeah, we're a tidy bunch.

Before
Here's what it looked like after we moved all the crap out and washed the floor down twice, once with TSP and once with muriatic acid:





After
And here's what it looks like after we painted it with an alkyd epoxy concrete paint from Rona, followed by waking up with terrible headaches from the fumes and Amy deciding to stay home from work and paint over the smelly paint with some good old Armor Coat from Crappy Tire:





Sadly, no after after yet; still have some painting left to do. Anyway, I think that's enough pictures for one post. I have more, but one of them is going to be a post in and of itself.

Oh, and coming soon: a break-down of all the different tasks and jobs involved in doing your own basement reno, together with a frank appraisal of whether they're worth doing on your own, or if you're better off hiring someone to do it properly. Er, for you. To do it for you. Yeah.


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