Project: Finishing the Basement - Part 2

I have a love/hate relationship with Spring.  On one hand I love that the weather is warming up.  I love being able to spend more time outside, spring clothes, and wearing flip flops again.  I do NOT like how busy things are.  With end of school testing and projects and spring sports things are totally NUTS at our house.  We have at least 2-3 things happening each and every evening and things are busy during the day too.  I am so ready for things to SLOW DOWN!

In addition to all the school projects and sports, we are also finishing our Playhouse Project and we put our HUGE garden in on Monday (posts to come).

But while things are crazy with our schedules, we are still making some major progress on the basement.  When we last saw the basement it looked like this.... a complete disaster!

All of our stuff was originally piled up in the middle of the room to make room around the edges for framing.  Now that we are done framing and ready to start drywalling the bedrooms and bathroom (the family room will be done later), it was time to move everything again.  Last week I spent a couple of days moving all of to the far end of the room in preparation for draping.

If you aren't familiar with the drywalling process, let me inform you how incredible dusty it is.  Drywall dust goes EVERYWHERE! And after they tape and mud and texture, they have to sand the walls which makes it go even more places.  So, all of our stuff had to be draped.

Kevin purchased a box of HDX Painters Plastic and a DeWalt Hammer Tacker to help me drape a wall to block out all the dust.  We know it won't be perfect, but it will be a whole lot better than nothing.

We wrapped the armoire and couches separately and used duct tape to secure it in place.

Using the Hammer Tacker, we stapled the plastic sheeting across the floor joists.  Where the two plastic sheets met (they slightly overlapped) we duct taped it together and also put blocks of wood on the floor.

We also draped off under the stairs as well as the storage room. 

But, we left a pathway back to the cold-storage.

They showed up to start sheetrocking on Monday morning this week and finished on Tuesday.  They came and taped yesterday and will start mudding and texturing next week.

I am thrilled with seeing space take shape.  The girls are beyond excited to see their rooms coming together.

I am getting bids right now for the tile floors.  As soon as the sheetrocking is done I will be spending MANY MANY hours painting ceilings, walls, and trim.  I've got a lot of work ahead of me.  But it will be worth it in the end.

Have you finished a basement before? Any tips and tricks for me?

Love this post? Be sure to comment! I'd love to hear what you have done to get your freezer space organized!

Organizing Your Food Storage

When we first moved into our new home, one of the first things we did was build shelves in our cold storage and I set to work organizing it.  Then the case-lot sales happened.  And then it got cold.  And going down into the cold storage and spending time putting away all of the case-lot purchases would have required a coat, gloves, and hat.  And it would still be cold.  I do NOT like the cold.  I lived in Texas for 11 years and loved the heat there.  I dread each and every winter in Utah.  So, I put off re-organizing and putting away everything until spring.  Well spring has arrived and it was finally warm enough this week (and I had time) to spend some time down in the cold storage and tidy things up.

There was so much to put away, that it couldn't even be contained in the cold-storage and spilled out into the storage room.

It took me a few hours and lots of rearranging but I finally got everything put away.  And it makes me happy to have an organized cold-storage again.

One of the things I tell people when I am helping them organize is "Put the things you use the most closest and at eye-level."  Well that is exactly what we have here.  The first shelves when you walk in is toilet paper, paper towels, beans, condiments, breakfast items, and my 5-gallon buckets of flour and sugar. The items we use the most.

The next set of shelves has soups, pasta, and vegetables. The third set of shelves is baking items, fruit, drinks, and snacks.   Snacks are actually something that we use a lot, but I don't like to put them front and center or they tend to disappear.  So they get stuck in the back so they aren't as easy for the kids to grab.  

The end shelf has canning supplies, some extra household items, paper goods, packaged foods (which we don't eat very often), and drink and water storage.

It's so nice to have my storage room back.  Things are accessible and easy to find.  Make this organizer heart happy.

Do you have food storage? How do you organize it?

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Project: Finishing the Basement - Part 1

Hello friends! I mentioned in our New Home posts that we would be finishing our basement, turning our 3-bedroom home into a 6-bedroom home, within the first year.  Well, that work has begun! We are very excited about this.  We currently have all 5 kids in 2 bedrooms, which is less than ideal.  We are, of course, making it work thanks to my mad organization skills, but it will be so nice to get all of the kids in their own rooms eventually.  The girls especially are anxious to not be crammed 3-to-a-room.

For our budget's sake, we are only finishing the 3 bedrooms, bathroom, and a couple of closets in the family room right now.  Once we get those done and the girls moved in, we will save up some more and finish the family room.

We had hoped to do most of the work ourselves to save some money, but Kevin's work schedule and his side business have been keeping him so busy that if we wanted to get it done, (which we NEEDED to do ASAP!) then we had to hire out a lot of it.

We were able to do some of the framing ourselves, but we ended up hiring out most of it.  We also hired out the HVAC (which we couldn't do ourselves) and the plumbing.

We have been able to do the electrical ourselves, and it is nearly done.  I had never pulled electrical before, but it was very easy.  We have a couple of electricians in the family, so we will have one of them actually hook it all up to the electrical panel.  We also had another Central Vacuum outlet put in downstairs.  It hooks in to our current system (which I love!!!!) and will just have to be hooked into the electrical as well.  Sheetrock will hopefully start next week if we can finish up a few more framing and electrical things.

Each of the girls bedrooms have been wired with can lights and a central main light.  I got some really great deals on Overstock for the main lights for each of the girls rooms.  I can't wait to show you once they get hung!

One of the changes we made from the original builder plans for the basement was the bathroom.  With 3 girls using the bathroom, I know space is going to be a premium, even with it being so large.  I'm not a huge fan of the long skinny bathrooms (like we had in our last house) when all of the girls are trying to get ready in the front of the mirror or I am trying to help them with their hair.  So, in the front part of the bathroom, with the vanity and mirror, I bumped out the wall and extra two-feet to give plenty of room for doing hair and getting around anyone standing in front of the vanity.  This is going to be wonderful!

For our vanity, we priced out many options, and Ikea could not be beat!  We are going to be doing a 24" linen cabinet, with drawers on the bottom, a 24" sink base, and 2 more 18" drawer bases.  So each girl will have a set of drawers for their stuff, plus some added linen closet space to hold extra towels and toiletries.  I'm still working on counter tops.  We also still need to pick the tile for the floor and shower.  We plan to do that during the sheetrocking phase.

Two of the girls rooms are going to have a closet (with a built-in organizer) for their clothes and an additional closet with just shelving (for toys/crafts/etc.) I'm really excited about the extra storage this is going to provide them! Yay for storage!

In this room we are going to be doing a window seat and built-in bookcases on either side of the window for my avid-reading daughter.  We put in additional small can lights above the seat with a switch nearby as well as near the entrance of the room.  With the additional storage she will have with the built-ins, we didn't do a storage closet in her room.

And this is the very DISORGANIZED rest of the space.  Most of the stuff in here will be going into the girls rooms.  There will also be room for a lot of it in the family room closets we are finishing.  Can I tell you how much this STRESSES ME OUT???? The mess is killing me.  But I am so excited for the finished product.  I can't wait! In the mean time, I am plotting all the organizing I am going to be doing when we are finished.  Now that will be FUN!