Basement Deconstruction

I started demolishing the "Joe vs. the Volcano" room over the Thanksgiving weekend. The whole room was covered in a 1/8" layer of drywall that thinly veiled what can only be described as a Pepto Bismol Chamber of Horrors!!!

All four walls were painted this awful (but not quite hellish) hue of pink. The ceiling was obviously insulated, but not drywalled in its previous incarnation.

The flourescent pink, orange, and yellow paint (and the ceiling mounted mirror!!!) must have been pretty f'ing trippy while getting bombed and listening to Iron Butterfly sometime in the 70's.

Here's a shot showing the wall that I'm removing to make two rooms into one big room. This new big room will the the family room/movie theater/homework room.

The Seedy Underbelly

My winter project is going to be to get the basement completely gutted. As you can see from the pictures below I've got quite a bit of work to do. I need to go through 7 years worth of kid's stuff and see what needs to be saved, what needs to be sold at a yard sale, and what needs to be trashed. Only then can I continue tearing apart the old finished areas. My goal is to have a completely empty basement to serve as a blank slate.

The door at the top of the stairs will eventually be removed. I'm going to put in a couple winder stairs coming down from the main level so I can move the stairs back a foot or so for better head clearance at the bottom.

This used to be a guest room. It was probably the most "finished" room in the basement, although for some reason it reminds me of the office from "Joe Vs. the Volcano".

Another view of the old guest room. The closet is against the east wall of the basement. The wall on the left will be removed to open up this space so we can use it as the family room. Current plans call for an "Old Hollywood" theme and a large flat panel TV on the wall.

This is the tiny, decrepit old bathroom circa 1980. Everything will be removed, the footprint will be slightly enlarged, and the new bathroom will be consistent with the work we have done on the main floor.

This is our current laundry room. It will remain a laundry room, but it will be properly finished with some built-in cabinets and ironing board. (How many code violations can you count!?)

The boxy room on the right is the bathroom. The room on the left will become the new guest room. I'll have to put in an egress window and a closet, but it will end up being a good sized guest room (about 10'x12')

Finally, our tour takes us to what will the the other half of the family room. The wall to the right is the one that separates this space from the "Joe vs. the Volcano" office. You can just see the edge of the bathroom on the left.

The plan is to first gut the entire basement, then put in new PEX plumbing and run CAT6 cable everywhere while everything is accessible. I'll figure out the rest at that point.

Mystery Wallpaper Revealed!

If you read the Wallpaper Detective post, you know that I speculated about the existence of a long-lost layer of wallpaper that must have been put up in the 40's or 50's. Well, as I was scraping the last remnants of wallpaper out of the 1" wide gap between the door and sideboard moulding, I found a piece of the missing wallpaper.

Let's Play Wallpaper Detective

I've got a challenge for you all! Here's a picture of my dining room wall taken in the middle of the wallpaper scraping phase. I've studied it closely, and I think I can piece together all of the various incarnations it has taken on over the years. I'll list them out below, and I'll even throw in the first and last ones for you. Your job is to fill in the missing slots, using only this picture (click on it to see a bigger image).

Note: I went ahead and filled in the rest.

• 1. Walls: Rusty Red Paint; Trim: Dark Stain (not shown, but deduced from other trim in the room.)


• 2. Walls: Mint Green ; Trim: Dark Stain


• 3. Walls: Mystery Wallpaper* ; Trim: Off-white


• 4. Walls: Gold floral wallpaper ; Trim: Gone!


• 5. Walls: Blue Floral Stripe wallpaper ; Trim: N/A


• 6. Walls: 80's Floral Wallpaper (not shown in this picture); Trim: N/A


• 7. Walls: Devine Blush red; Trim: Devine Icing white (coming soon!)

* #3 was tricky. If you look around the edges of the bare plaster (where the trim used to be) you can see where someone had painted the trim an off-white color. They obviously didn't care about keeping a sharp edge as they painted. That was my clue that there must have been a "mystery wallpaper" that was put up around the trimwork. That layer had to be removed along with the trim before they could put up the gold layer. UPDATE: Read here for the mystery wallpaper Revealed!

I Found a Treasure Map!

It's good to know that whoever remodeled this house some 25 years ago had a good sense of humor. Checkout the messages I found behind the wallpaper.

This one says: "The money is hidden behind the third row of bricks in the north wall of the fireplace."

Right next to that was the following latin text: "Ad tempus homo est nihil pindar 81 AD" Anyone speak latin?

Kitchen Demolition

I managed to put off the real demo work for as long as possible so the kitchen would stay completely functional most of the time. It turned out to be 2 weeks of mayhem, with only 1 week without a kitchen sink. (you have no idea just how often you use your kitchen sink until it's gone!)

This is what the kitchen looked like in the middle of the tear-out.

Here you see the lovely pink and green two-tone that must have been the original wall colors, as well as the most recent country-style wall paper.

Not much left here. The dishwasher is one of the few things staying.

We've actually turned the corner in this pic. The ceiling is painted its final color: Devine "Icing", the walls have a skim coat of plaster and their final color (at least the parts that won't be behind cabinets or backsplash): Devine "Butter" and I've installed the nailers for the crown moulding.