It’s time for another update on the basement. We’ve been stalled out recently, busy with too many other things. I was ahead on hours at work this week, so we decided to take Friday off and make a huge two day push on the basement. We’re both sore and exhausted, and looking forward to a day of rest!
Due the decision to move the bathroom into the laundry room, we needed to do some more sewer plumbing rework. We really didn’t feel like doing it ourselves, so we called in a local plumber. We liked the estimate so we went ahead and hired him. After looking at the end result, we felt like we got our money’s worth! It was a lot more complicated to add in the bathroom drains than we were anticipating. This actually happened a couple of weeks ago.
Here is where this weekend adventure really starts. We decided to work on the new family room. Since the decision to make move the bathroom into the laundry room, we’ve been at a bit of a loss about what to do with our old steel cabinets. We considered putting them up on KSL, but never got around to it. Then one night, Kathryn woke up with a fantastic idea of how to include them over in the laundry room in a manner that we could still the fun retro laundry room, and the bathroom! Now that we decided to keep them, we went ahead and gave the sink one last cleaning before it’s new life over in the other room.
We had some great help to make the weekend possible. Suzanne came over for whole day and took care of Ashley. Kevin was amazing and came over and helped us for almost the entire day too! We wouldn’t have been able to make it through the day’s jobs without either of them.
Removing the cast iron sink was a workout. Those things are heavy!
We were originally going to leave the walls up in the family room, but made a last minute audible and decided to rip them out. The outlets weren’t in the ideal location, and there was no insulation in the walls. We will replace them with 2×4 walls.
I have no more desires to knock holes in walls after this project. The goal of the family room is to make it as open as possible. All unnecessary walls are now gone.
Kathryn snapped this pic as Kevin and I were driving to the dump. I’ve now taken 5 loads of debris to the dump, two from this weekend. Darus and the trailer have been very handy.
The cast iron stack was wanting to crack where the old washing machine drain screws in. In order to avoid a huge mess from a broken cast iron main stack, we decided to go with a gentler pipe remove method and cut out the steel pipe with a cutoff wheel. This worked very nicely. Behind this wall is the stairway coming down into the room. All of the wall to the right of the old outlet has been deleted.
Day 2:
Wow this room has sure opened up. You can see how we cut the wall back to the middle of the first stair. We’ll probably just trim back the handrail. The carpet is ripped out too. We decided to get crazy ambitious and level the floor this weekend.
After a trip to the dump, we headed to Home Depot. We picked up 12 bags of sand mix concrete and a couple of bags of floor leveler. We cleaned up the floor, brought down the wheelbarrow and shovel, and decided to just go for it! Here is the first batch going down. I would bring down a bag of concrete, and Kathryn would bring down the water. We both pour our load into the wheelbarrow and I’d start mixing and then dump it. The first couple of bags were totally mixed in the wheelbarrow, but then I decided to go puedo Puerto Rican style and do most of the mixing on the ground. I’d mix it up a little in the wheelbarrow, and then dump it out to finish. This worked much better and faster.
Ten bags of cement later, and lots of work, here it is. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t need to be. This is just the base that will be under the floor leveler mix. That’s the game plan at least. We hope that the floor leveler works as advertised and leaves us with a nice surface to put our carpet on.
Wow, what a weekend! I haven’t looked forward to the resting part of Sunday this much since I was working on the farm with Mom and Dad.