Basement Makeover Morning of Day 1

Our basement makeover is underway! Jon and I have been working in the basement to create some sort of order. On the east side of the basement it is one long room. Last year, Jon and his brother, Darren, built shelves for us to stores tubs of stuff in. We have now pretty much moved everything into tubs and even have them LABELED...my label maker was the best gift ever! We then moved it all to one end of the basement. This weekend we are putting up a wall in order to separate the storage area from the rest of the basement. Darren and Jon swap weekends in the winter to do home projects...this weekend it was our weekend to have Darren here. Steve and Jean are keeping Grady today and overnight so that we can continue to work during Grady's nap time and late into the night. :-)

We have also decided to put up drywall to make it into a little office area as well. This will be nice for us! So, more work it took, to get this weekend underway. We ended up peeling off the old paneling and the old styrofoam that was stuck up there. Today we cleaned the walls with bleach and scraped away old plaster. Then we painted the wall back up with sealer...now on to the construction of one of the walls. This is so exciting! Here are a few pictures of our work so far today. I only wish I would have taken pictures of what it looked like BEFORE we started even sorting our stuff because it was a mess! Basically when Jon and I got married, we just combined two households of stuff (and a lot of junk) into the basement.

Here is the North end of the room - this will be our storage area but right now we have it packed full so we have plenty of room to work elsewhere.

About a foot or two before the shelves start is where the wall is going to be. See the pretty clean and painted wall? Great job everyone!
More of the east wall - this will have drywall and everything on it after this weekend. Yea!

When we removed the styrofoam we found a crawl space under our porch area. Not something that I wanted to know about b/c it was just a big black whole.

Since I was a wuss and would not stick my head in there to look around, I took a picture instead...lots of spider webs for sure. We also saw that when they built the porch that they had put instillation in there (basically in the floor of the porch).

More pictures of the east wall.

This is a picture of the east wall and the south side of the basement. We will just put drywall up over the south wall. Behind that wall is a cellar type of room - we have more stuff in there - a lot of baby things and Christmas decorations etc. More storage!