Work in the basement...

Our basement was 'finished' when we moved in, but there were a lot of things that were not done really well. The drywalling was a little sloppy, the baseboard was some "wood-look" plastic, and most of the door frames weren't finished. Oh - and the couple of doors/windows that were finished were stained a deep red color. Not to mention the orange/gold carpet! ;) I've always planned to finish and fix the doors and windows, but I guess I just don't spend enough time down there for it to quite irritate me into action!

I finally decided about a week ago that I was going to JUST DO IT! Actually, I decided I was going to put new baseboards on (we took off the old ones about a year ago when we put the new carpet in), but realized that of course I couldn't accurately cut baseboard when there were missing door frames. So...door frames it was.

Here's a few before and after pictures...the hall closet before (no framing at all, lovely brown plastic folding curtain):




And the hall closet after...

Family room windows...

The family room windows didn't have any frames on them either. It's amazing the difference it makes!!! :)

Before (well, I had already primed one window before I remembered to take a picture!!):

After (without the blinds put back up):

Making progress!

Slowly but surely I will get the family room downstairs painted! Things got off to a slow start because the first job was to remove the wallpaper from the one wall that still had it. May I just say that wallpaper removal is one of my least favorite jobs!

But that's done and I've finished the two full walls in the darker color, and one side of the lower wall. We were in town yesterday and picked out the color for the top half of the walls (you can see a little patch of it in one of the pictures - it's just two shades lighter). Tonight I'm hoping to start painting the top half...at least the window wall so Greg can put the blinds back up and passers-by won't see right into our basement!

We have carpet!

Our new basement carpet was installed successfully yesterday and it looks GREAT! It brightens up the basement so much compared to the old dark brown/orange carpet. :) We moved some of the furniture back last night and are happy with the new arrangement. The kids seem to really like it (Abby spent half an hour dancing around in circles down there this morning!) and it will be a great place for them to play.

Here are some more pictures of our basement project, starting with the 'fun' job of scraping out all the old carpet:

Basement progress!

The downstairs project is coming along really well! The electrical work is done (hooray for a light that operates with a switch rather than a pull string!) and the drywall is up and the first day of mudding is done. We had a very successful day in Grande Prairie on Monday and not only found carpet at a good deal, but someone to install it next week as well! So this weekend you'll find us scraping up the old carpet. :)

We've added more recent pictures to the slideshow below - it's fun to watch things progressing so quickly!

And the walls came tumbling down...

We started a big project last night - moving one of the walls in our basement! Whoever finished the downstairs in our house made a HUGE laundry room, which is really a waste of space, so we decided to move the wall separating the family room and the laundry room over about three feet, to make the family room bigger. A couple of friends (one of whom is an electrician - very handy!) came over last night to help Greg and Gavin get it moved.


Today Greg hopes to get the new part of the wall framed in (there needs to be a little jog to go around the water pipes), and maybe start putting up the new drywall. The family room looks so much bigger now and we're very excited about having the extra space!

Click on the pictures to see the full slideshow.

Finally - deck pictures!

We got our deck stairs installed last week and over the weekend we finished all the railings (well, we still want to put a 2x4 on top of all of them, but that may not be until spring).