New Year, New(ish) Furniture!

We finally did it!  We finished our master bedroom furniture!  So I have to start by saying that this isn't really our "style" but we weren't willing to pay $10,000 for sturdy furniture.  We did the best we could.

Over two years ago, we found this bedroom set for $600 on craigslist.  It was the same color as our floors, had an 80's era speckled finish, ugly brass hardware, and had some spots that needed refinishing.  So we stripped it, stained it, and put on some teak oil to protect it.

Now we have a high quality (i.e. dovetail drawers, etc.) bedroom set that cost about $680 (and many hours of labor).  Our bedroom now looks like grownups live here - I'll post more pictures later.

Samantha will soon be turning one and we need space to host her play group for a party.  So we decided to finish a portion of the basement before then.  Here is the preliminary basement plan - we'll be finishing the Rec Room.

The before pictures are pretty bad - this was after we moved out all the stuff, removed the ceiling drywall and cleaned the floor. 

There were some major issues with the floor.  The large trees near the house had roots that pushed the concrete floor up in places.  It wasn't bad enough to need to repair but there was a height difference up to 1 1/2 inches in places - too much to shim.  So we decided to pour self-leveling concrete on top of the floor.

My parents came down this weekend to help us level the floor.  It went pretty well and didn't take long at all.

 Once the floor was poured, we prepared the exterior wall for installing foam insulation.  There were some boards to remove and the outlets to remove/seal. 

The outlets on this wall were cemented into place.  Due to this, the outlet boxes have been completely rusted through.  We removed these so they were flush and sealed them up with foam.

We used some expanded foam and Great Stuff to seal up the joist cavities and then extruded foam on the exterior wall.  This should allow the Rec Room to be nice and toasty!

Before any of the work in the basement, Chris and my dad took a lot of junk to the scrap yard.  We have a lot of old appliances from the house (this load was two ranges and an old water heater) and plenty of scrap metal from the old fence, old pinholed copper pipe, etc.  We didn't make a lot off of this scrap but it was more than if it was still in our basement!

 

I was able to send off the birthday invitations to Samantha's play group - they turned out pretty well!  We'll see how many 6 month - 1 year toddlers we can hold in the basement...

I've been pretty bad about taking Samantha's weekly pictures lately.  Here's one of her dressed as a bear with her jingle bells.

We have a lot of work to do in the basement in the next 4 weeks - wish us luck!