Basement: Before, During, After

Here is our basement before our March flood.

View from the stairs.

View from the toy closet.

View from the electric piano corner.  The doorway on the right leads into the toy closet.  Go through the closet and you're in another room--Jansen's old basement bedroom, which is now James' office.

The stairs up to the main floor.

Yikes!  The old toy closet.

More toy closet.

From the doorway, the toy closet.  You can just see the corner of James' office through the open doorway.

Perhaps you can tell from the wood paneling that this basement was about 60 years old.  The basement was the only room of the house that hadn't been redone in our construction projects.  We had intended to redo it sometime in the next few years--when we had both the money and the courage to embark on such a major undertaking.

But then we had the flood in March.  Since we already had to take out all of the walls and the carpet, we just decided to tear down the ceiling, redo the lighting, and take advantage of the fact that we'd already moved everything out of the basement to redo it all.

You already saw the flood photos.  If not, you can find them here and here.

At this point, James is taking the wood paneling walls down.

A view from the stairs.

After this shot, I left to visit my sister in St. George.

When I came back, James had already gotten to this point.

In a very short amount of time (about 1 1/2 weeks), James had redone the entire basement, including the carpet, walls, and ceiling.  He redid the wiring and added a bunch of new lights.  He also removed some existing interior walls and created some new ones.  .

The wall that you're looking at in this photo used to have a fireplace on it.

Then James created a new toy closet down at the opposite end of the basement from where it used to be, in front of the old fireplace.

James built a wall over the front of the fireplace, and created an accessible panel for the vent from the boiler.

This is where the old toy closet used to be.

James tore out the old toy closet.

He tore the carpet runner off the stairs.

Removing the old toy closet meant that the little window that had been obscured since we moved in here was now free and gave out a decent amount of natural light for the rest of the basement.

Painted and waiting for carpet.

Not pictured is the sump pump in the back basement, installed "just in case" this once in a hundred year flood ever happens again while we're in the house.

The new toy closet.  It's much smaller, but so much better organized.  I love to look in it and see the orderly rows of toys and games!

The finished basement from the the new toy closet.  We decided to have the carpet layers cover the stairs with nicer carpet than the old carpet runner we'd had before.

The finished basement from James' office door.  We totally love this room!  It's a great space in our house and one we enjoy being in, now.

A sweet little play space where the old closet used to be.

Wrap up:  There is no other way to say it other than "James is amazing."  He worked day and night to reconstruct the basement, finishing in about 1 1/2 weeks.  It actually took me longer to move all of our possessions back down to the basement than it did for James to tear down and reconstruct it.

Even though it wasn't in our plan to redo the basement (no, our insurance didn't cover any of the damage) at this point in our lives, I think it was a real blessing.  When would we ever have had the courage to move everything upstairs and embark on such a major undertaking?  It sure wasn't fun at the time.  

Now that we're on this end of it, we're very happy!