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I woke up this morning at 8:30 when I heard the front door slam. Blind (I didn't have in my contacts) I rushed downstairs to see who had left. Rear lights from my oldest daughter's car told me who it was. She'd spent the night elsewhere, but had evidently needed something before going to her anime convention today. Ah well, at least my hubby hadn't set his weekend alarm (1 1/2 hour after normal wake-up time so he doesn't get used to sleeping in, because it makes it harder to get up on weekdays! Geesh. I don't want to wake up at 7:30 on weekends!) But now that I was up...
I made myself a cup of coffee and wandered downstairs...only to hear hubby mention he'd like to get 7 pieces of 1x4 so we could finish off the entertainment center in our basement. And voila, that's what I thought I'd share with you today. For those who don't know the story, we've lived on this property since 1995. The original house was a doublewide trailer that would have been condemned by the health department if they'd known of it. It was trashed by the previous owner and stunk of cat urine and poop. We cleaned it up and fixed the worst of it but didn't invest too much because we had a lease-to-own agreement and didn't want to risk something happening.
In 2000, we purchased it. In 2003, we tore the house down and lived in the garage that we'd renovated for exactly that reason. By February of 2004, had moved into our present home. (BTW, I LOVE this place!) You can see a flash show of the outside changes here.
 
Building a new home doesn't mean the construction and fixing-up is finished. To the contrary, we immediately started work on finishing the basement. Ray built himself a studio/office and me an office. Later came the pantry. Lastly, we began work on the entertainment center (including splitting off the utility room). Since we've been doing all the work ourselves, it's taken 5 years to get to this point but we're very happy with the results.
 
It's not exactly the same angle. The first picture is a straight-on photo from the basement steps towards my office. In the second picture, it's from the back of the basement looking towards my office door. The entertainment center takes up the center and back of the basement, with my office on one side and Ray's office on the other side of the steps. It's hard to see, but we laid a pergola floor ($1 per square foot + underlayment). On the left side we put up wood wainscotting to protect the drywall from the chair hitting and denting it.
We still need to put up a drop-ceiling in the entertainment room, but it's finished otherwise. The 1x4 lumber is for the utility room door frame we're putting up. After this project is done (except for the ceiling), we'll finish the pantry, then start cleaning up our disaster-of-a-garage. After we'd moved out of it, it was trashed with extra construction materials, stuff from our last house, etc. It's going to be a huge chore.
As for the house, we still need a front porch, side mud room and would like a sun room off the dining room sliding doors (which are currently blocked off). I imagine these projects will take us another 5-10 years, but it's something to look forward to. |
