Basement Bedrooms

Aside from our basement bathroom and our family room library, I haven't written much about the things we've done in our basement, even though it's completely different than it was when we first bought the place!  

When we bought the house, the basement was mostly unfinished: with just one room in the middle working as an office and guest room.  It wasn't a total disaster, but it wasn't an area we were readily using... unless it was really hot in the summer.  Now, we've turned basically the entire floor into usable space, and only have a few more things left to making it really work for us.  

Bedrooms

In 2020, we were only slightly surprised with a second set of twins.  With a two-bedroom bungalow and the impending addition from four people to six, we knew we needed to make some changes to the basement in order for that to work!  So, the unfinished half of the basement got a major makeover.  

I knew the minute I walked into this house where two bedrooms would work well, and as soon as I could (2020 was... an experience), I got the walls framed and insulated, along with insulating the ceilings to help dampen sound transfer.  With two bedrooms needing to be completed - one bedroom for the big kids, and one home office for both of us to now work from home - I knew prioritizing the kids' room would be easy, and I used the One Room Challenge as a way to motivate getting the second bedroom/office done.  

The Walls

While we left spaces for the egress windows to go in, I was able to finish the rest of the rooms around them.  A friend who is an electrician was able to help get us wired when his company work was on hiatus, and we were lucky enough to source materials before the major shortages or extreme lumber prices.  We luckily had a lot of what we needed nearby, and I think Ben at the Lowes Pro Desk saw me more than just about anyone outside my house from April until July.

The hardest part of both rooms was drywall.  Trying to hang drywall while corralling two six-year-olds is hard enough when you aren't fully pregnant, but that was a whole new level.  I wound up using a 1x2 as a ledger to keep it off the floor while I screwed in the full sheets at the bottom.  Since our ceilings are only 7 feet, it was easier to cut and lift the narrower ones into place.  I will add one of the kids was very eager to help and definitely got into getting those top ones hung with me.  My partner and I did the ceilings: him holding the sheets like a Spirit Bomb, and me screwing them in as quickly as I could.

Then we did the floors.  We used some strategic moving of the office between the family room and the new office so we could get all three rooms done at the same time.  It was one of the "creepy factors" that the kids needed to start feeling good downstairs.

Egress Windows

The biggest stopping block for getting the big kids moved down to their new bedroom was getting the egress windows in.  The install options were for me to did the hole and hammer drill out the holes myself, order the windows, more framing... and eventually foundation repair, or to hire it out.  We chose the latter.  This pushed the egress window installs to the beginning of August.

Our babies were born at the end of July.  I was diagnosed with severe pre-eclampsia, and spent eleven days in the hospital.  We all survived!  Having been through a completely different ordeal with the first two, that was my only birth plan.  

Anyway: the windows.
The kids' room window went in exactly as expected.  I got home just in time to sit in a different room while they worked, and answer questions when they came up.  The office window went right through a significant foundation crack.  Three years prior to this, we had our foundation assessed by all the folks, necessary stabilization measures put in place, and the house levelled as much as reasonable.  So, they couldn't install that window yet not wanting to exacerbate the crack, but they did have a sub to fix the crack before installing it a few weeks later. 

At some point, I'll write about the individual designs of each room. In the meantime, they do have their own highlight reels (Office and Kids' Room) and a few posts over on the Instagram.  Both rooms have had a few reconfigurations since then, and the office is more of a temporary storage while we get ready to do the attic... old house projects include a lot of creativity in the order of operations.