I wish I had set up a camera to capture all of the work done last week on the new basement school room. All of the other learning areas didn't require as much work as the basement. At one point in time, our basement was finished (by previous owners), but it definitely needs some love and renovation. Our ultimate vision for our basement was a bedroom in one quarter of the basement and a den/big kid hang out area in the other. We decided to finish the bedroom room for now (although, even that isn't all of the way complete).
The first order of business was ripping out the old A-frame. This sunk the basement ceiling a good 4-5 inches shorter than it actually is. We left the ceiling open for now, in case more electrical work needs done on other parts of the basement. Which brings me to the next phase, electrical. Matt (I can write we all I want, but everyone should know by now that I would have no idea what to do) rewired the basement, put in new lights and outlets, and got half of the basement ready for our overall vision project (no date on when we'll do that, just a someday thing).
After that, things changed drastically. We were going to put down area rugs, so that we could finish the floor at a later date, however, we decided to finish the floor, clean it, put carpet tiles down, and clean and paint the walls (the walls are still cinderblock). Our initial thought was to rip out the cabinets and shelves because, long term, we don't want them. But as we got ready to tear them down, I decided I wanted to keep them to use as storage for homeschool supplies. The cabinets and shelves are in decent condition (not the best, but also not falling apart) and hold A LOT of material that would otherwise be taking up space elsewhere.
I had "help" painting the cabinet doors and drawers. We painted them on a humid, 100 degree day. Needless to say, they were sticky and took a long while to dry. But we do what we can in this Iowa weather! For those wondering, the dog still has paint on parts of him from all of the "help" he contributed.
Thankfully we used a primer and paint combo, so it only took a few coats of paint. We got a gallon of paint from the Re-Store, as well as the carpet squares and a few other odds and ends. It's our first stop in any home renovation we do.
Let's be honest: kids are messy. I have no idea how much use this room will see this school year, so we didn't want to glue the carpet squares down to the floor and create more work for ourselves later on (especially if we have to replace this carpet when we make the room in the a bedroom). The carpet tape has worked wonderfully! If a kid destroys one square of carpet, it will be easy to pull up and replace it with a new square (we bought extra just for this reason). When the world returns to "normal" and we decide we want to do something different with the flooring, it will be easy to take out.
The carpet took 2 days to put in, as we had to scrub the floor, wait for it to dry, put it in, make sure each square was stuck down completely, run out of squares and go back to the store to get another box, finish the last part, then decide to do a bit more that we hadn't planned on. Once the carpet was fully installed, that's when things got fun. We built new furniture, moved other furniture from other parts of the house (the hair pin desk was in the boy's room), and set the room up.
The basement wasn't the only rooms to get a makeover. Zeus moved into the boy's room, the area rugs that were meant for the basement went into the mini's bedrooms, we moved furniture around in bedrooms, deep cleaned, and got the living room ready, as that's where our next project will be. We'll be installing a new built-in shelves/TV stand again one wall in the living room...and by we, that's Matt. I just do the designing and hold veto power.
Even though it was a busy week getting the room ready and getting ready for homeschooling, we also had some fun moments:
