The basement!!!

When we started finishing our basement on June 11th, our contractor told us it would take about 6 weeks to complete. It has been almost 7 weeks now and we are so close to being done! All that is left is a bit of painting/touch-up painting, and carpet.

It has been so fun to pick the design and style of things and to see it take shape. 

It also has been CRAZY and busy with more trips to Menards than I can even count.

We opted to lay the tile floor and do all the painting in order to save some money. It took us 2 weeks to do our part (which is why we are a bit behind in our schedule) but we are really happy with how it turned out.

We'll post final pictures when it is all done, but here are a few of where we are now.

Our neighbors had this beautiful Travertine tile leftover from when they tiled their bathrooms. There was just barely enough to tile our bathroom.

Tyler was amazing--tiling the floor with a broken foot. I was his trusty assistant :)

Our electrician wired for a ceiling fan in our living room on the main level--hooray!!!

(Notice the olympics on the tv--we were watching the opening ceremonies.

I have a love/hate relationship with the Olympics. I love watching it, and feel so inspired by the determination of the athletes and for their dedication to their sport, but by the end of 2 weeks I feel like such a slug after watching so much TV. Makes me want to go out and start training for something and peel myself off of the couch :)

Okay, here is the tour:

This is the view at the bottom of the stairs when you first enter the basement.

The door to the right is the storage room, the four cabinets are for additional storage and not pictured to the left is another closet for storage. Did I mention that storage was very important to us in designing our basement? 

The bathroom is just to the right of the storage room.

Then you enter the rec/entertainment room.

This is a view of the other side of the entertainment room.

And this is Ty's room/the guest room

 The day we tiled some good friends invited the kids over to play. They had built a "water blob" as they called it and the kids had a blast running and sliding on it and getting each other soaked.

We've had so many good friends help us with this project, from watching the kids, to lending us tools, and helping us paint.  On the day the sheet rockers were sanding we had to turn off the A/C in order to not get white dust all over our entire house (it kind of worked...) and it happened to be a 100 degree day. I think it got to 90 in our house. We have one box fan and were all sitting around it trying to stay cool, and we had extra kids we were watching so we couldn't just get in the car and go to Target to cool off :) Some good friends took pity on us and invited us to dinner that night to relax and cool off. It was such a blessed break from the heat and so fun to get out of our construction zone.

We are so grateful for good friends.

 The kids wanted to help me paint, so Garrett helped paint the under-the-stairs-kid hangout, 

And Shayla helped paint Ty's closet.

Ty helped paint the bathroom, but we were so busy painting I didn't get a picture of him.

Now the favorite activity is playing hide and seek in the empty basement. A favorite hiding place is the storage cabinets. Too bad they will be full of stuff soon and they won't be able to hide there anymore.

Hopefully we'll post pictures of the finished project in a few weeks. 

We can't wait to move back in to the basement and get settled!