Basement Makeover - End of Day 1

The end of the first day is over. Jon and Darren accomplished a ton of stuff today. Two walls were put up as well as some, outlet boxes, instillation and plastic. Tomorrow is drywall. Yea! Here is Jon in his sexy eye ware.The building of the East wall - this wall was the one creating some troubles. The floor was uneven and it sloped. This is what caused the men to drink, but as you will soon see, they got it built!

The walls are built and are up in place - this is where they meet.

Jon was so excited to finally get to this point.The two walls. Can you tell they covered up the crawl space? Whew!

Oh no, we have a problem. The hammer drill bit is shorter then the screw, so we were had to figure out plan B. Well, plan B worked and we screwed the walls into the floor and wall.
I love this look! Now on to the instillation.

My hardworking husband!

Look - they even are building outlets into the room for me.

Hanging of our instillation - the air compressor staple gun was not working, so I pulled out the regular stapler and guess what...it worked. Whew!

End of day one. They are tired!!

Basement Makeover - Afternoon Day 1

The afternoon of day 1 has been underway and is moving...not super fast...but moving! While the men have been working and making noise below, I have been able to clean out my cupboards in the kitchen and have been working on my pictures. Later tonight I am going to tackle Grady's room as it is time to shuffle through his clothes and take out what he has outgrown. What a perfect time to do this since he is at Grandpa/ma Moseley's house for the night.

As I said, the men have been hard at work. They have only needed to make one quick run to the local hardware store and only had to call their dad for tools once. Always a good sign! Below is a picture that I took while I was standing in the "doorway" of the new room and looking SW towards the stairs that lead upstairs. We have construction materials and stuff everywhere! The paneling on the wall is what we took off in the other room.

This is a view from the stairs looking into the basement. The yellow sheet in the right hand corner has been or makeshift "door" into the east side of our basement. As you can see we have the furnace right in the front room...so it's not a very pretty site.

Jon and Darren are building the first wall. This wall will separate the two rooms.
More building...see all of the dust that is in the air right now. Goodness!

Our wall is at least in the upright position. It is not in place yet as they are working on the other wall and need some extra space. They also built this wall with such precision that they needed some type of big hammer to knock it into place - so they called their dad.

Steve to the rescue! He brought over the tools they needed! I teased Steve that he came right over because Grady was driving him crazy - but he said I was wrong. He said that Grady has been a very good boy and is at his house building with blocks.

They have been trying to measure for the next wall and the floor is not even and is giving them problems...the solution for the three men...drinks!

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!

Swimming Time

Today we took Grady to a local hotel to play in the pool. We thought it would help keep him comfortable in the water for this summer plus we thought it would be some good ole' fashion fun.

Grady was not so in love with the water in his eyes when he started out - but by the end, he didn't care if water got in his eyes...the more water the more fun.

Jon and Grady - they are so cute!
He loved being thrown in the air and caught. There should be a video of this below as well. Luckily it was Jon doing much of this - I tried it and dropped Grady and under he went. What a trooper - he didn't even cry. He wanted more!

Pure happiness! Pure Bliss!

More daddy!!!

Yep - I was there too.

Grady along the poolside...

I tried to get a picture of Grady and I, but I couldn't get the camera right.

Here is a video of Grady splashing around right at first...

Here is a video of Grady being thrown in the air by his daddy!

Bathroom Fun

Here is a cute video of Grady playing in the bathroom...enjoy!

Saturday Fun

Today we started by watching the Hawkeye's play football, but soon decided that this was probably one of the last nice days of November...so off for a walk we went. During our walk we stopped by a friends house. Since her and the boys were out in the backyard, Grady and I stopped by for a chat. Here Grady and Nolan played in the back yard.

Then when Jon came home we decided to take yet another walk. Here is Grady wanting us to hurry up. He loves to go on walks.

Grady got a ATW for his birthday from his Grandpa/ma Moseley. We decided this was a perfect night to break it out. The nice part is that it has plenty of room for Grady's stuff. His water bottle, favorite puppy and his favorite blanket...we are now all set to go!

Daddy and Jon - the wagon still has the bow on it! Thanks for the present!

Here we go!

We stopped at Byrnes park and let Grady play in the leaves. He had so much fun!

Then we went to the jungle gym at the park. It had slides, swings and a bunch of things to climb on. Grady had so much fun!

Playing on the swings!

I had to stick in this picture. Isn't he a hottie!?!

Back home we go...

There is always a first time for everything

Today Grady and I made some pumpkin bars. The best part was that Grady got to lick the homemade frosting from the beaters. YUMMY!!