Mar. 5, 2008 - My latest challenge - Home Schooling through renovations
My husband got inspired a couple of weeks ago and thinks we should renovate our basement. Here is how it is going.
Got the basement cleaned out. It's about a 450 ft big room. Had our TV area, storage and scrapbooking area in it (about 1/3 of the room for each). Got most of the wallpaper (on 2 walls) off. Discovered that the one wall (the longest, of course!) had the gyprock right down to the floor - should be 1/4 inch gap between the gyprock and floor to allow air to move.
Dear husband tore out the small closet and made it bigger - in preparation for making a bathroom in the near future - still forming that in.
Took out the carpeting that was on 1/3 of the basement. The long wall mentioned above is *floating* in one spot, so dear husband removed some of the gyprock to make sure behind it was ok. It is - probably some concrete moved a bit somewhere. Good to see the insulation and forms are fine. Easy to tack the wall down properly.
Need to take off the rest of the wallpaper (that is not coming off easy), fill the nail holes and sand, fix some of the gyprock - make sure it is 1/4 inch off the floor everywhere, wash the walls and then paint.
By the way, my schoolroom and laundry room are completely full of items from the big room.
Once the walls are painted, we've got laminate waiting - Dear husband thinks that will be easy - a day's work or so.
It is a very rewarding project. Older house, so the wallpaper wasn't to my taste, but a huge project to redo - so I never did it. A friend said she thought it was what I liked. Not at all!
And removing old carpet? Well, how rewarding is that?
Amazing how wallpaper covers up imperfections - and how novices built a lot of these older homes.
Dear husband and I couldn't believe the gyprock - put in vertically instead of horizontally and going right to the floor is very poor work. So interesting finding out these things as you work on them.
Anyway, we are still in the midst of it two weeks later. Got the first coat of primer on. Dear husband is still repairing the gyprock - a couple more pieces to replace. Once that is done, will sand and finish painting the primer. Then on the top coat AND after that, the laminate. He has promised it will be done before going to Mexico on a Mission Trip (mid March), so life is interesting.
I'm not a reno person. I hate my house out of order, so this has been hard for me. I continue to pray for strength and joy through this journey.
