When we bought this house last fall, it was billed as having a “partially-finished” basement. This is probably accurate, though unclear. “Partially-finished” seems to indicate that some sections aren’t really all that usable, and that wasn’t the case here. The below-ground floor was divided into four main rooms: a finished master bedroom; a mostly-finished-though-ugly front room; a middle room that is mainly devoted to water heater and other appliances/pipes/etc; and a back room that is mainly storage due to a lowered ceiling (under the sunken living room) for 3/4ths of it. Other than the finished master bedroom, the rest of the basement is ugly, but still either mostly finished or semi-finished.

Anyway, point is that we decided to finish finishing the basement, at least as much as can be done. The storage area with the low ceiling (about six feet) will likely never be anything other than storage and weight-bench area, you know? But the rest of it has potential. There are water and sewer lines in the middle room where the laundry used to be, which means we can add a bathroom to the lower level. All the rest will just involve some floor-leveling, room-partitioning, and (major) updating. No more dirty old paneling, flat carpet, and drop ceilings!

Earlier this week, we decided to get started by prepping the area that will become the downstairs bathroom. Attached to this is the staircase, which needed to have paneling pulled off to open it up and perhaps even make an eventual book nook! I got a little in-progress photo of this (above). Paneling is visible on the side of the staircase we didn’t (yet) rip out. That paneling used to go all the way from floor to ceiling on the side of the staircase now open. The door on the left will be the entry into the bathroom.

Of course, all this construction made for nervous and/or excited cats. One of them – we aren’t altogether sure, but suspect it was Nimi – decided to take advantage of the newly opened path to the rafters. Little did she know that drop ceilings aren’t exactly meant to hold 9-lb cats. After a loud clatter, during which (thankfully) no cats were hurt, we discovered that our basement now looked like the picture on the left.

Indeed. Half the ceiling was gone. Of course, we were planning to get rid of that already, but maybe not so soon. That wasn’t the original room we were going to work on! Ah well. It meant that over the next few days, and yesterday especially, there’s been a lot of work going on:

(ceiling off, walls start to come down)

(more walls down, paneling off, time to haul to the dump…)

(perhaps that’ll be a book nook one day!)

So this is where I’ll be for the foreseeable future. I do still plan to be at the blog, but I might be a bit more sporadic about posting for the next few months. If I disappear too long, give me a shout out to make sure I haven’t buried alive in my own basement, haha!