basement renovation take one: carpet

When Nic and I moved in to our house nearly 4 years ago, everything was right with the world. Our first house, it was perfect.

We got to work right away making minor changes (paint, flooring, etc), making the house our home.

And then one summer it rained. And rained and rained and rained.

And our basement leaked. And leaked and leaked and leaked.

That summer much of eastern Iowa was devastated by historic floods.

 
source and source

Clearly the water issue we were having paled in comparrison to thousands of others being displaced because their entire house was under water, or floating down a river - but it as a problem that need to be taken care of nonetheless.

During the flooding, we were visiting our friend, Greg, in Alaska. We learned of the floods when a story appeared on the front page of the Anchorage paper. We were not too concerned about our house, as our friends had been keeping an eye on it for us and we hadn't heard from them. However, upon returning to my mom's house, we received a call from Lucky Pawz, were Maia was being boarded, letting us know that they were in the process of evacuating all of the dogs, but to not worry as they were all safe.

When we finally returned home, we got right to work removing a large section of soggy carpet in our basement. As we rolled it up, ready to take it out to the curb, gallons of water literally spilled out the ends.

Thankfully, the entire basement wasn't waterlogged and we were able to stop after removing one large section.

Since that summer, we have talked about future plans for the basement and three years later, we finally took the next step!

On Saturday night, Nic and I got to work removing the rest of the carpet from the basement - step number one in creating an awesome useable living space.

The plan::

• clean up floors, and possibly pour another layer of concrete down and polish it 
• install an egress window 
• maybe sheetrock
• repaint walls - biggest task, the paint that is there currently is peeling
• move my office downstairs

Here are some before and afters (note, currently the basement is pretty much a dumping ground for old crap that we need to sort through and work stuff).

Before::

North end - 


South end - 


 During::

After::

North end - 


South end - 


And we are now officially the white trash neighbors in our hood...



I love the blank slate and can not wait to get started! We are hoping to have a few people over this week to give us quotes/ideas on the floors, walls and windows.

What would you do to make your basement a fun, functional living space?