Basement stuff…

The basement in our house is about 1400+ square feet.  It is a decent size, if a little short (only 7′ ugh!) The spaces are large though…  

It's basically split into four rooms -a storage room, family room, and two bedrooms. Each space is large but not equally proportioned.

Originally when we walked into the basement, you walked into a teeny tiny 3 foot wide by 12 foot-ish long hall with 4 doors!  The doors that actually opened into the hall space, just to make you feel even more cramped!   You had to walk around them to get in the rooms. SO confining!!  Those of you with claustrophobia look away!

The first door to the right was the storage room, to the left was a “bedroom” (that was actually used as a little shop) next on the right came the family room door and straight down the hall was the other bedroom!

The floor plan was just not very functional.  In order to keep changes in budget, we couldn't make many big changes because of bearing walls, egress windows and the like- but a few simple changes that we could do!  Here is what it looks like today.

 

First, we decided to open up the bedroom to the left, at the bottom of the stairs and turn that into the family room incorporating the hallway into the space. Which means when you walked down the stairs you walk into the family room!  Some much better- totally unfinished at the moment!!   BUT with one simple change, the space is nice and open!

The storage room, is very ugly… but it is doing it's job right now, so it's day will come… someday- not today.

We use Bedroom A as an office, and the other bedroom, is huge and unused mishmash space at the moment!  

The reason we are talking about this today however, is the bathroom….  I use the term “bathroom” very loosely, what we actually had was a scary spider hotel with plumbing pipes.  There has not been a real bathroom, even though the plumbing has existed for 57 years!!

57 years!

Baby, your time has come!

Although, at this moment it may still take us 5 years to actually completely finish – ya know – it's coming!  And later today we will show you the amazing progress we have made so far.

Okay the biggest pain of the bathroom plumbing is the location.  As you can see in the first floorplan above, you had to walk down the stairs, straight down the hall into the far bedroom, through the bedroom to a little half bath.  On the plus side it was in the center of the house, BUT it was in a bedroom instead of accessible to all the rooms, it is only accessible to one!  Such a bummer, it almost makes the other bedroom useless… Who wants to sleep in a basement with no bathroom and have to walk up stairs and to the other side of the house int he middle of the night for potty breaks?  NOT ME!

However, because we swapped the family room with the bedroom(shop) the two bedrooms ended up being on the same side of the house, this meant we could create a Jack and Jill bath by opening up a door way through to the half bath (by that corner cabinet below that just happened to be hiding the main plumbing stack in the house!  The other added bonus is that this also allowed us to double the size of the bathroom and take some from one bedroom and some from another, so now we have a full bath instead of a half bath!

(I know your jealous of the natural beauty of this room…breath it in!)

But getting to the whole bath plumbed situation has been months and months of work!  Most of the work we didn't photograph!  What kind of blogger am I anyway…?

Some of the things we have had to do ourselves, and somethings we hired professionals for, and little bits of things we did to help cut time from the professionals and save money!

The very first thing we had to do, was create an opening from bedroom A (with the half Bath) to Bedroom B – no half bath.  There is a big chaser for all the HVAC on the ceiling that runs down the center of the house in Bedroom B.  This actually brings the ceiling height down to just barely over 6′.  Luckily most of the HVAC ended in time for us to hang the floor joists instead of creating a huge header  and open up the space inthe bathroom anyway to just under 7′.  This also helped create a nook in this large bedroom with such a low ceiling, so it doen't make you feel as uncomfortable.  But we'll talk about that more later.

From abandoning all the old galvanized pipes that ran all the way around the house to get to the bathroom and took 35 minutes to get hot water there (I may be exaggerating slightly) – to cutting out the concrete floor in order to drain the tub and add a new sink drain. Moving the HVAC to the bathroom above and putting in a hanging beam for the floor joists so that there wouldn't be a huge header between the two spaces in each room (we had a contractor do that)..

There was months and months of thinking and working and planning and hacking to make this work!  Literally we started last December 2016…  But we have drywall and tile board up!  Stay tuned! 

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